The Erosion of Free Will: Why Society's Loss of Belief in Freedom Is Dangerous

"The view from Athens (the city of Reason) has been mixed"

Come on, isn't this just a bit of a narrow-minded set of premises to start arguing from? Can't we at least stretch out Athens to encompass the Babylonian and Egyptian astronomers and numerologists, at least? And, hey, why'll were at it, you could admit that the Abrahamic tradition that this all is apparently opposed to does include Islam as one of the three main branches, hmm???

Oh gosh, and look, there are these Hindus and Buddhists and Shintoists and Taoists and pagans and what not who've probably been debating free will since before Abraham was born.

Perhaps nobody has ever pointed this out to you? I'll be charitable and take account for ignorance before proceeding to condemnation.

> The denial of free will is probably behind the view that if you’re born with a certain color of skin you have blind spots that you are incapable of seeing or escaping from unless you submit to programmatic training by the people who accuse you

Which basically boils down to "I felt uncomfortable in my D&I training at work" and don't like people telling me that, no, I'm not the exception among white people and don't have internalized prejudice formed over anywhere between 20-50 years of fleshy machine learning. Everyone thinks that and everyone is wrong. It doesn't even work like that, it's not a thing you are or aren't.

Honestly I can't tell at this point if it's a failure of people involved in diversity training or a huge success for the people trying to undermine it that this confusion persists so strongly.

> If there’s no free will, every solution must be a top-down one. If people aren’t free to choose, then “people don’t change”—they can’t change. It’s fair to write them off forever or make irrevocable choices in relation to them.

"I don't like when rules are made with a systems point of view because, again, I don't need it and exceptions should be made for me." It can't be that people respond to the incentive structures they're placed under and changing those structures changes behavior. Or the same thing from the other angle anything that causes a broad social change on an individual level was top down we're just pretending not to see what changed the tide.

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Unrelated but also not unexpected given the rest of the article.

> A society that loses its belief in freedom loses the ability to believe in conversion [...] It loses hope A person can justify any action because they were “born this way.”

I accept that I could be reading into it because the author is talking about crime but this seems to subtweeting the lgbt hard. There are basically no other modern usages of the phrase "born this way" that aren't medical or makeup. It's hard not to see this as someone who's frustrated at not being able reject someone's sexuality because they were in fact born that way; the "unnatural lifestyle choice" is a piece of rhetoric that's never really left us.

Yikes. Found the true believer.

However, as you’ve noted: this wasn’t integrated into all (or even most) Christian doctrines, and so the author’s Judeo-Christian-style argument doesn’t really hold water. It reads closer to paleoconservative rhetoric around fundamental unity between the two (with the implication that Islam is somehow fundamentally different).

What? This seems totally backwards. Author thinks that real love comes from free conscious decisiomaking? Like freely choosing which model of car to buy?

I almost laughed out loud when I got to the subhead "A Childish Conversation". Some points are okay, but overall this is just not a well argued piece. Strikes me as just conveying numerous fairly boring grievances.