We have talked before philosophically in GD about topics like “Do we really have free will?” etc. and the viewpoint of some was that we do not truly have free will because we are always constrained by many real-life factors. I wanted to discuss a related offshoot of that - specifically, how religion constrains choices and behavior.
In religions such as Christianity, Islam, or others, many (but not all) adherents operate under the fear of offending God (or Allah, or a god) and hence are dictated by that into certain behaviors (such as refusing to eat pork, refusing to provide gay-wedding cakes, etc.) *(Whether or not these beliefs are valid or well-founded is irrelevant for this thread - all that matters is that they are held.) *
If someone is operating under fear of divine punishment, then their behavior is highly constrained and they do not really have free choice. In particular, one cannot expect their behavior to be changed by human laws, since the danger of offending human government doesn’t hold a candle to the danger of offending divine government. (Again, whether this belief is **valid **or not is irrelevant; all that matters is that it is strongly held.)
Under such circumstances, society cannot expect that human-passed laws such as “bakeries must provide gay-wedding cakes just as much as they must provide straight-wedding cakes” will actually convince a Christian baker (who believes that God does not want him to do that) to cave in, since the threat posed by God significantly outweighs the threat posed by human laws. (They could get him to close shop, though, since that does not pose a religious conflict.) I think this religious compulsion is often misunderstood or underestimated by non-Christians - they do not realize that it can be just as strong/adamant as a Muslim’s refusal to eat pork. You can’t expect someone to do X instead of Y when the consequences of X are worse than Y, according to their belief system.
(Not to make the thread specifically about gay-wedding cakes only - religious compulsion applies to hundreds of topics under the Sun - but just citing one example.)
TL;DR - if someone genuinely believes that there are strong negative religious consequences for doing this or not doing that, then they do are not operating under true free choice - just like how, in other philosophical discussions, it was mentioned that people do not truly have free will.
They’ve chosen to operate under that religious framework through free will. There’s nothing stopping them from choosing a different religious framework, or none at all. It’s not a get out of moral choices card.
You can also freely choose to assault people you don’t like. But then you’d get arrested and put in jail, because your “free choice” is always going to be constrained by social norms and the enforcement thereof, to one degree or another, the punishment depending on how important those norms are to the society you are living in. People who live in community with others (essentially, everyone) are always and universally so constrained.
What you are discussing are norms of a smaller community inside of a larger one which has a conflicting set. Has little to do with what I think of as free will.
They feel compelled to act or not act by something greater than man-made law can encompass. The same can equally be said of non-religion based compulsions as well. I don’t think the former deserves any lesser or greater allowance than the latter. I see nothing special about religious compulsion.
I haven’t seen much evidence that the desire to correct other people’s behavior is any weaker than religious compulsion. So ISTM that people saying “you are doing that wrong” are also not acting out of free will. In the best cases, of course, the other person is doing it wrong. In other cases, it’s that some people can’t sleep at night if they know someone else disagrees with them about something about which they feel strongly.
“Live and let live” is not a universally accepted principle.
In the Christian baker case, I believe the gay people specifically sought him out to try to get him to bake them a cake.
Ideally, IMO there would be a sort of “conscientious objector” status available. If you think war is immoral, you don’t have to fight. If you think abortion is immoral, you don’t have to have one or participate in someone else having one. If you think gay marriage is immoral, don’t enter into one, and don’t bake a cake for the reception.
Unfortunately, that often leads to the “someone is wrong [del]on the Internet[/del] in real life”, and people can’t leave it alone.
Your understanding of “free will” is quite different than mine. If I have free will, I can make choices, but I still have to face the consequences of those choices.
There are plenty of people who choose to obey “God’s laws” rather than human laws. This includes atheists who practice civil disobedience, who refuse to go against their conscience and do what they believe to be wrong.
But what is it that makes one’s will truly “free”? True freedom of the will is something that has to be worked toward. We all have vices that we must overcome. Vices enslave us to bad actions. The drug addict is not free to resist drug use until he can overcome his addiction through a possibly grueling process.
In Christianity, the hope is that over the course of one’s life, one can progress from
-Point a) refraining from sin solely out of fear of divine punishment
to
-Point b) freely refraining from sin, motivated by love for God and neighbor
I don’t see that this has anything to do with whether or not humans have free will. If we have free will, we can choose to act, taking various things into consideration in making our decisions in any particular matter. If we don’t have free will, then we aren’t actually choosing anything, we’re just deluding ourselves into thinking that we do so. Whether some of what we take into consideration is religious beliefs has nothing to do with the question of whether we’re actually considering anything at all.
And considering the wide number of versions of Christianity, and their wide number of opinions on the particular example brought up in this thread, it certainly appears to me that, if we can make choices at all, many people who choose to be Christian deal with this specific issue by choosing a version of Christianity that allows gay marriage. So I don’t think there’s any evidence that being Christian, in itself, somehow “compels” anyone to refuse to bake a cake. Being a member of a specific Christian sect may of course require somebody to choose (presuming again that choice is possible to humans) among changing sects, changing lines of business, or being penalized by the law; but again I don’t see what that’s got to do with the free will issue.
– come to think of it, isn’t it a specific tenet of Christianity that we do have free will? if we don’t, wasn’t Eve compelled to eat that apple?
This is describing a version of free will where being influenced by an awareness of the consequences and outcomes of a decision limits your free will.
How do we determine which consequences count as free will limiters, and which ones don’t? I mean, consider the following quandry: To eat a chocolate chip cookie, or to each a sugar cookie. You know nothing of nutrition here; all you know is that one will taste like a chocolate cookie, and one will taste like a sugar cookie.
Is the awareness that you might (or might not) taste chocolate a limiter on free will?
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more. While normally I would dismiss the OP’s definition of “free will” as being philosophically absurd, it does seem to align reasonably with the common phrase “of your own free will”. As best I can tell the implication of that phrase is that you are allowed to make your choice without something actively stopping you from making that specific choice.
For example, the option of a sugar cookie doesn’t prevent you from choosing chocolate, or even try to talk you out of it. The addition of the sugar won’t change your mind about the chocolate if you’re really interested in choosing the chocolate. However if there was an angry man threatening to punch you if you ate the cookie, then you might change your mind despite being really interested.
Which sort of gives us a fuzzy distinction between limitations that would impact “free will” and ones that wouldn’t - anything that would cause you to say that you’re not making the choice of your own free will would be such a limitation.
So, religion.
If somebody was actually complying with the religion out of fear of harm or hell, then yes, that would be an imposition on free will. But I don’t think that most religious people see it that way. I think that religion tends to warp its adherent’s idea of what is right, which alters their preferences themselves. In other words, it changes their taste preference from chocolate to sugar. They are not being forced to choose sugar; they instead prefer it because persecuting gays makes them feel like better people.
Alternatively, they could see religion less as threatening them with hell than as tempting them with heaven. Generally speaking rewards and added positive outcomes are not seen as abrogations of free will. If I’m considering the chocolate and somebody offers me a thousand dollars to eat the sugar instead, you wouldn’t say I was forced to take the sugar. You’d say I took the sugar, and the bribe, by my own free will. So to with religion: if people see their religion as more of a carrot than a stick, then they would adhering to its tenets by their own free will.
Nothing special or significant about religion in the question. Making that the example just sets it up for more tedious Christianity v post/anti-Christianity debate (‘religion’ being taken to mean Christianity in a very high % of posts/threads on this forum IME).
Believing in free will is not a religious question even though in Western context it also sometimes tends into Christian v post/anti-Christian debate. But in any case it doesn’t mean believing there are no constraints on individual action, including arguably self imposed ones. Of which Abrahamic religious belief (‘God wants X’) would be only one of many. The constraint could be a quasi-religious philosophy which does not require belief in a sentient God who gives reward or punishment, say Confucian principles. It could be an anti-religious ideology, say Communism in places and times where it was widely and seriously believed as an ideology. And even when a religion, philosophy or ideology isn’t believed by the individual making the choice, others who believe it could still impose a cost for certain decision. It could be social pressure of a community, whether family, local town, web board community, etc to follow certain predominant ideas among them; whether or not religious ideas in that case is irrelevant. Myriad sets of ‘rules’ can influence choice and it still be ‘free will’.
All ‘free will’ means is that your consciousness as you perceive it is making the decision, rather than forces/events beyond your consciousness*. It doesn’t mean you make choices in a vacuum without considering your own moral, religious or political beliefs or those of others and how they’ll react to your decisions in ways that affect you.
*more specifically in context of Abrahamic religions it just means the omnipotent God they jointly believe in won’t make the decision to act rightly or wrongly for you; will only let you know what the rules are.
A lot of what you say is about fear and offending God. Though in my personal experience, it does not work that way, if you are doing the work of God (not from religious observations, but divine relationship with God), you are not afraid, at least at the time, and are above ‘man’s law’ and know it. You see the results and it’s nothing short of miraculous. You might as well be holding a diplomats ID card and also doors open for you.
This also frightens, no terrifies many people, who want order and laws and don’t even want to consider what I said possible.
Free will means people make voluntary choices, even bad ones. You might think it’s not free will if all events are destined, predetermined - you think you chose freely but some divine force set you up for it, so it’s not your fault, right? That’s the excuse. Whatever happens is because your deity makes it happen. You’re only a pawn. Sad.
I freely exercise divine powers, the powers of life and death. When I drive in public, I could slaughter anyone on a whim, but my better nature chooses to let them survive. If I do happen to squash a few walkers, it’s because a deity made it happen.
Assuming any certain theological system is correct, we’re fucked. Sure, 144k people (not unborn embryos) have been pre-selected to avoid Hell while all other primates will be spit-roasted over eternal flames. Yikes. But we’ve no objective way to tell which theology, if any, is correct. What a pickle.
Free will is subject to limitations. I may choose to exit a situation but locked handcuffs or a thorough tasering may prevent that, as may threats to myself or my loved ones. Would I choose to be shunned? A tough decision…
With free will, nobody is forced to be a rabid fanatic. That’s only a lifestyle choice.
I think this is pretty dismissive of sincerely held religious belief. You don’t really choose your religion like you choose which shirt to wear in the morning. If you believe that the Seventh Day Adventists are the One True Path to eternal happiness, you cannot just decide to be a Muslim the next day.
To the OP’s point, I think that society should try whenever possible to accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs whether that is gay wedding cakes, providing contraception, or smoking peyote.
It is a balancing test and only in the most extreme examples should society force people to choose between complying with religious beliefs and violating the law. For gay wedding cakes and contraception, there are so many other places to get these items that it seems easy to me for an accommodation to be had so that people get cakes and contraception on one hand yet those who are morally opposed can practice their religion on the other.
Only when you have a situation, say that my religion compels me to sacrifice a virgin on the night of a full moon, that society should step in and say that we will simply not allow it because the harm of allowing it is far greater than the harm to the individual, regardless of his unique personal beliefs.
What I think terrifies a lot of people about such an attitude is that, however genuinely beneficial your personal results and doors may be, it’s probably also how the people flying planes into the towers felt.
There is no evidence whatsoever that being certain one is doing God’s work guarantees that what’s being done isn’t something genuinely terrible. There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.
Let’s say that someone held a gun to your head and told you that if you don’t withdraw all the money from your bank account and hand it over, you’ll catch a bullet. I think most reasonable people would say that you were under coercion and not acting under your free will if you were to carry out these actions.
The OP is arguing that religious adherents are similarly coerced. If you make a choice because you’re afraid of God’s wrath, then that choice isn’t freely made. You’re being coerced, the same as if a gun is being held to your head.
I agree with this. However, I don’t see this as being fundamentally different from other choices we make. I look both ways before I cross the street because I’m afraid of getting hit by a car. I don’t hit the snooze button more than once in the mornings because I’m afraid of the ramifications if I show up to work late. Personally, I don’t think “free will” is a useful concept and I very much doubt it exists anywhere in the universe, especially in human beings. We are being coerced all the time. We just aren’t aware of it because it’s happening unconsciously. And even if we aren’t being coerced in all of our choices, we have no way of knowing when this is the case since we aren’t privy to all of our decision-making processes. So I don’t think there’s an intellectual rigor in the entire concept of free will.
I think believers (however you define this) tend to speak out of both sides of their mouth when the subject turns to free will. On one side, they believe in the notion that people possess free will and are thus free to do whatever they want, irrespective of external factors or physiological state (like fear). But on the other side, they talk about how a strong belief in God is essential for good self-governance and morality. Believers frequently question the morality of the agnostic and atheist. They often suspect the ability of the non-believer to know right and wrong…since they believe God alone imbues people with this ability. If you don’t believe in God, what’s really keeping you from murdering your kids and sleeping with every Tom, Dick, and Judy and stealing from all your neighbors and being a monster? Without God, don’t you know you’re just an amoral beast?
Believers will teach their kids that they have free will, being super intelligent and everything, but then they will teach them that Jesus is going to send them to hell every time they are caught masturbating or watching porn. Why do they do this? Because they know that fear is an effective constraining mechanism. Even super intelligent people respond to bogeymen. You can make people do or not do all kinds of things by instilling enough fear in them.