What do you believe? Do we have free will or not? This debate has raged for eons and when you add the concept of predestination to the mix, there are passionate adherents for both, then we are faced with an apparent contradiction. (Clue: they really aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive concepts.) Free will is many things depending on what we do with it, how we handle it. So back to the original question, do we have free will or not? If not then nothing you do has much meaning because you are only tangentially involved. If we do…free will requires a high level of responsibility.
Personally I believe we do have free will. It is a gift. But it is not a license. We can’t use our will to control others or dictate what they should believe, how and why. I don’t believe you can use your free will to subjugate another’s. Free will is meant to allow us to make our decisions – right or wrong, good or bad. The caveat in this is that my decisions inevitably do affect others. Thus a new dilemma.
What’s the answer to this conundrum – who takes precedence: me or someone else who may be affected? Paul provides us his response to this situation and it’s related to causing another’s stumbling. 1 Corinthians 8 talks about when/if your liberty (based in your understanding and knowledge) leads you to cause another to stumble, then your choice(s) needs to be tempered.
I said that if we didn’t have free will, nothing has any meaning. But we aren’t robots, we aren’t puppets. We have the power to make our decisions. But we also have to realize that we also bear the consequences for those decisions – we are responsible. Fortunately, we aren’t left alone to our own devices. This means that we can choose to follow a standard or not. We choose what standard to follow. So… the end is, free will is a gift. What we do with it is our gift.
