What is Free Choice?

I hear this term tossed around too much these days as evidence of human suffering.

"God gave us free will or free choice in our actions. That's why suffering exists?"

Or, "We are 'wretches,' as the song, 'Amazing Grace,' says we are, and only through Christ's redeeming blood can we be saved."

I just don't buy these ideas anymore.

I have a willingness and sometimes a stubborness to have a viewpoint, but I don't always have free choice.

1. I didn't choose my parents, although I love them dearly.
2. I didn't choose to be raised in a Church of Christ, although my parent's chose that.
3. My choices are based on my parent's choices; therefore, I am somewhat limited in my free will as a child when my behavior, to some degree, was predetermined for me.

What might I be if I were raised as a Buddhist or Hindu? How would my so-called free actions be determined by my culture then?

I don't believe that I am a total social construct to this culture; I have choices to learn other cultures and rebel against my own, including the Christian faith.

But, free choice is limited more than we realize, even though we view the United States as some kind of safe haven for libertarian and free-flowing ideas.

Here are a few examples of limitations of free choice.

1. Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi, and the gospel of Matthew clearly states that he has come to this earth not to destroy the Jewish law. Jesus could not move beyond Judaism; only something like the Roman Empire could take the Christian movement to a different level altogether different from the Jesus movement of the first century, and still the Roman empire used its cultural, pagan roots as a method to adopt itself easily to Christianity.

2. Harold Bloom might say that we can never truly free ourselves from our parental heritage, although we try to improve upon it in our own egocentric pathway, yet we are still bound by that past. This is obviously Freudian, too. The scientific revolution breeds Romanticism, a kind of anti-enlightenment period or at least a conversation with the past. Luther and Calvin certainly promulgated the Protestant Reformation, but they created hierarchical churches not that different from Catholicism. And, they rejected the real revolutionaries of the period: the Anabaptists (the modern Brethren, Mennonites, and Amish who were viewed as pacifists yet blasphemy to the church hierarchies).

3. Muhammad needed Christianity and Judaism. Nanak needed Hinduism and Islam before Sikhism to be established, yet what if Nanak lived in an area where only Hinduism and Christianity prevailed. Would the religion have a foundation in Christianity and Hinduism rather than Islam/Hindu systems? Of course it would! We are bound by our cultural heritage.

So, is having limited free choice and a cultural influence of identity a terrible idea?

That's a question we must answer for ourselves personally, if it can be answered.

Nevertheless, I plan to be a realist here.

I am not a wretch as the song "Amazing Grace" implies.
I do not need a God-Son to arrive on this earth to save me from my wretched state.
If I did, then why did God create suffering in the first place? Surely, it wasn't to loathe ourselves so much that we need to turn to some higher source for comfort! If anything, we need to turn to other human beings because that is what people do in church, to some degree.

Well, that's my message today. If you reject it, is it because of logic, or is it because you were raised to reject these kind of ideas?

--Jinglett