It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is FREE. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom...

In the secret recesses of man’s nature the grace is given disposing and enabling him to yield. Though the will must at last act from its own resources and deliberate impulse, it is influenced through the feeling and the understanding in such a manner as to give it strength. It is utterly hopeless to penetrate...

Our minds are information vacuums. Either we fill them with thoughts of our choosing or someone else will.

The true free-will ain’t a matter of choosing one of many choices…but of creating variety of options, then deciding the best choice of all.

Maybe none of us can choose who we love, Cas. None of the lucky ones, anyway. The only choice we have is how we serve that love. And Ethan’s made his choice. What about you? Are you going to reject it, or make the best of what you’ve been given?

Determinism gives you the freedom to do whatever you like.

Destiny is variable, not fixed; it is forever changing depending upon your free will to make choices for what you want your life to be.

My choices matter—and there are paths towards making wiser ones—but I cannot choose what I choose. And if it ever appears that I do—for instance, after going back between two options—I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness.

Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be...

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good...

A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be...

You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more...

No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.

My destiny plays with me in such a wayI feel I play with my destiny.

. . . it is presumptuous in me to wish to choose my path, because I cannot tell which path is best for me. I must leave it to the Lord, Who knows me, to lead me by the path which is best for me, so that in all things His will may be done.

Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only ‘pseudo problems,’ because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character....

There was just such a man when I was young—an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had...

The division in human religion has always been between those who see the fall of man as a fall into freedom and those who see it as an act of defiance against the tyranny of an all-powerful father. But Adam and Eve were never in heaven; they were in the mud, and had to leave...

Getting unstuck is a matter of choice. If you want flourish in life make a choice today to move into that reality. You can do it.

The answer to the question raised in the title of this essay – Is salvation a matter of divine determination or human responsibility? – is not divine determination or human responsibility. The only thoroughly biblical answer is yes. Scripturally, it is not an ‘either-or’ but a ‘both-and’ proposition. Why is this so hard? For one...

Technically, according to the notion of the will of God, there is no such a thing as a competent surgeon.

If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to inheritance left by our ancestors.

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.’ He held out his hand, palm open. ‘Free will has to be taken,’ I said.

Free will…it’s all the rage these days

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

Having learnt from experiment and argument that a stone falls downwards, a man indubitably believes this, and always expects the law he has learnt to be fulfilled.But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under...

Had God kept from being made those who through His goodness were to have existence, but who by their own choice were to become evil, then evil would have prevailed over the goodness of God. Thus, all things which God makes He makes good, but each one become good or evil by his own choice....

I am a free person.I am free to dream.I am free to pursue my dreams.I am free to love.I am free to serve mankind.

You can change the road you take, but sometimes it can bend back to lead you straight to that same stubborn fate.

If God did not arrange [the world] this way, then there must be an independent factor in the universe. And if there is such, one consequence and perhaps two follow. First, the doctrine of creation must be abandoned. A creation ex nihilo would be completely in God’s control. Independent forces cannot be created forces, and...

Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

Mastema prefers absolutes. He wants fences on the world and everything in its place, neat and tidy as a churchyard garden. God is not like that. God is boundless. For all his wisdom, Mastema cannot comprehend Yahweh’s need for surprises. An omniscient Being would naturally yearn for things beyond His control, futures He could not...

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made...

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free.

Remember that the choices you make, and the reasons you make them, shape your destiny. Remember your free will…And remember, what the True One has made is supposed to bring balance and unity, not anger, fear or revenge. Do not fear, what is yours to use. Only beware the ends to which it is turned,...

Imagination is cheap as long as you don’t have to worry about the details.

Yes, you can create your reality. Once you free yourself from the negative effects of karma. I know it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between free will and karma. Focus upon your free will and your ability to create reality. I’m optimistic and hopeful you can do this.

The most purely free decision one can make—and thus, the highest order of spirit on Earth—is believing in something without evidential knowledge.

It’s not enough, is it? Just to follow; just to have faith in someone bigger and smarter and better informed. That’s how we’re built, that’s how every Partial is wired – to follow orders and trust in our leaders – but it’s not enough. It never has been. We’ve followed our leaders, and sometimes they...

To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It...

There’s an alternate view. That no man or woman alive is the disempowered victim of another’s degrading circumstance. Each is equipped to pursue their own fate. No one needs saving.

Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.

We must believe in free will. We have no choice.

The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To...

For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not merely passengers of history, but pilots as well.