Free Will — Are You Really Free?
Free will—that is what most Christians preach. God didn’t want to create robots, so He gave us free will. Through that we can choose to love Him or reject Him. He doesn’t force us, except when he does. No robots, yet a terrible place, filled with fire, pain and suffering should you say no and go your own way. Again: It is optional, unless it’s not.
I had a conversation with an evangelical Christian once about Hell. I asked questions such as “If a murderer accepted Jesus on his death bed, would he be accepted to Heaven? And how about a caring, loving person who happens to be an Atheist, would they be sent to Hell?” I noticed that whenever I brought up this topic, they started distancing themselves from it. They didn’t answer my questions directly, instead they only answered, “If you believe in Jesus and the Father, nothing else matters.”
So basically all you need to do is repent and you’re all set for Heaven. It doesn’t matter how good you are, your faith in the Saviour is what matters the most — at least according to my Evangelical friends. But, if that’s the most important part of being human, to have faith in God, why do we keep teaching people how to behave caringly? Why isn’t faith alone enough in practice as well?
I don’t understand the logic behind this type of religious thinking. Aren’t we supposed to be good and loving and that’s it? It feels like all this God needs is his creatures to believe in him and doesn’t care about how they act and who they actually are. Because if he cared, he wouldn’t send them to Hell simply because of their lack of faith.
So, what about free will then? If I get punished for not choosing God, can it be called free will? Who wants to burn in Hell forever? Obviously one would choose God if they believed in the existence of Heaven and Hell (I hope). However, that often has more to do with fear rather than free will. Many people choose God because they are afraid of Hell, but doesn’t your choice have to be genuine?
“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20).
I know, I know, some Evangelicals will now roll their eyes and say, “God doesn’t send you to Hell, you do.” But do I? Who created Hell? And most importantly, who created this whole system? If your answer is God, then yes, he does send you to Hell.
Moreover, an important thing to point out here is that one cannot choose what they are convinced by. I cannot choose to believe in Krishna, one of the Hindu gods. I either do, or I don’t. So again, where is free will?
A long time ago – in my pre-Pagan days – someone asked me to believe something that didn’t make sense to me. He said I needed to “make a decision” and to affirm his religious creed (he would have argued that it wasn’t a creed, but that’s what it was) despite my misgivings about it. He was asking me to lie.
So apparently we can’t choose what convinces us — asking someone to accept something based on nothing more than claims doesn’t really work either. Moreover, neither does a God who created everything (including Hell) giving you a choice of either following Him or suffering seem appealing, so I will just conclude that Evangelical free will is not a well thought out idea whatsoever.
If I asked you, a Christian, what free will regarding the afterlife meant to you, how would you answer it? Is it something that has to do with the acceptance of God or do you have another view on it? Whatever the answer may be, the ideas I’ve heard from my Evangelical friends are pretty confusing, especially since there is not really a choice there after all — or is there?
