"Free Will" Is A Necessary Fiction

Alan: Human freedom is a useful (and perhaps "necessary") fiction. 

But it is also a "conditioned reality." 

Perhaps the most surprising outcome of Trump's election is proof that people -- particularly "good Christians" -- can be conditioned to believe anything, and with each step deeper into perdition these "good people" are not motivated by a conscious choice to embrace evil but a conviction -- often a conviction arising from their fundamental religious beliefs -- that Trump is, in fact, their personal savior and the savior of the nation. 

We are all stuck where we are stuck. 

And "coming unstuck" is a slow, tedious, painful process. 

"Free Will" is nowhere near as free as orthodox Christian theology holds. 

The nearly universal obsessions-and-compulsions that compromise "Free Will" are real and they afflict us all.

They even afflict -- I will say "particularly afflict" -- "the most orthodox," people who are obsessively compelled to defend "Free Will" and other canonized orthodoxies that do not "hold up" without psycho-spiritual contortionism and intellectual arabesques that put Harrison Bergeron to shame. https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/09/harrison-bergeron-and-other-self.html 

I encourage you to observe the following set of mental calesthenics required by Pope Innocent III's conciliar pronouncement anathematizing the use of bows and arrows. https://forums.catholic.com/t/pope-innocent-iii-and-crossbows/318167 

More fundamentally, if "good Christians" can rationalize the election of Donald Trump, they (we?) can rationalize any god-damned thing.

For brevity's sake, I will not probe individual human beings' "genetic pre-predisposition to evil" as manifest in psychopaths time-out-of-mind, a fact that is coming-to-light only now as a result of modern psychological research which is one reason why many "orthodox" Christians spurn science. 

The strange case of Phineas Gage is also telling. 

Shades Of Phineas Gage: Brazilian Worker Survives Iron Bar Piercing Skull

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/shades-of-phineas-gage-brazilian-worker.html

The "absolutism" of "the orthodox" cannot admit the contradiction of traditional beliefs. For if they did, their "existential crisis" as "true believers" would not only require surrender of literal/absulutist "truth" but would eliminate the comfort absolutism affords. 

Here is the bargain Christian traditionalists make: "If I play by the rules, if I sign off on the WHOLE dogmatic package, my "personal salvation" is assured. 

For most people -- particularly those who believe that eternal torment is a real possibiity -- self-interested "salvation assurance" is Life's prime directive. It is not love. Not service. Not mercy, compassion or forgiveness. Not even the words Jesus speaks in the four canonical gospels.

What matters most is that "I" can rest assured that I've been spared "The Lake of Unquenchable Fire.

This central fixation on one's own salvation is an extremely subtle form of egotism. Such ferocious self-interest trumps Truth by clinging to tradition, not only for tradition's sake but because tradition provides the continuity-of-teaching that "proves them right" and thus insures their personal salvation.

Jesus Rails Against Human Traditions Of "Our Great Leaders Who Lived Long Ago" 

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/jesus-rails-againt-human-traditions-of.html

Pope Francis: There Are Two Ways Of Having Faith: We Can Fear To Lose The Saved," Or...

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/pope-francis-there-are-two-ways-of.html

In defense of Free Will -- conditioned as it is -- recall Robert Browning's act of faith in core fiction: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?" 

Faith is essential to human wellbeing, even when it requires belief in falsehood. 

I hasten to add that if "essential falsehood" does not work toward "universal salvation," the result of radically self-interested fiction tends toward cruelty-in-individuals and submission-to-autocrats in The Body Politic. 

"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/obamacare-and-hard-central-truth-of.html

Often, Stinginess And Cruelty Are Christianity's Paradoxical Effects

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/02/often-christianitys-paradoxical-effects.html

G.K. Chesterton On Charity, Hope And Universal Salvation

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/chesterton-on-charity-and-universal.html

Finally, it is crucial to be conscious of our necessary fictions while embracing them as mythic means to real ends.