"Free will?" WTF?

[ZackT]

I have a two part response to this. As far as the being responsible for our actions part goes; well if I wanted to say for example "I'm sorry I tried to shoot the elf; I'm not responsible however because there is no such thing as free will." The police would say back to me "We're sorry we're putting you in jail, but we don't have free will." It doesn't really matter directly wether we have free will or not as far as the practacle side of things go. It isn't a useful arguement to dodge punishment. Nobody would be satisfied by that arguement, and not surprisingly.
As to the part about having a sub-conscience wich is affecting us, I used that as a specific example of what goes into our decisions. We don't decide things from anything but our genes and our experience. In other words, if you are not useing your genes and your experience only to make your decisions what else have you? Decisions are determined by the laws of cause and effect. That is inescapable. And even if you said a decision was made wich was even in part not caused, you are just saying it is random, aren't you? And randomness does not imply will; it implies a lack of will.
What do you think?

The very act of choosing to do something random or unconventional is free will in itself, if you ask me. I totally agree that for most all of our decisions, they're going to be guided by whatever we think the outcome might be of our actions. But despite that, we can still choose to make "wrong" or "bad" decisions, or completely different and unrelated decisions that seem random. That's where the free will comes in. Just because we're not exercising our free will 100% of the time doesn't mean that it's not there.

And as for the God arguement going on in this thread, I didn't read it too thoroughly but I'll add in my quick-notes beliefs on it. I was raised as a Baptist (Christian if you don't know) and these days, I'd call myself Agnostic. In case anyone doesn't know, Agnostic means I believe in some form of a higher power, but I believe I won't know what it is while I'm still alive and therefore don't affiliate with any particular religion or customs.

I think there's some higher power, and I think that it's entirely possible that in some way, we're all touched by it throughout our lives, but I don't know if it's really possible to truly know when those moments come. I also believe all religions are predominantly the viewpoint of a few people and as such, aren't as "perfect" or accurately representative of the loving god they wish to advertise.

I just figure that as long as you try and treat people decently, then you'll be fine in the end.