God's Coventry

Theodicy

The spate of mass shootings in this country are enough to make people question the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God.  The issue of how to reconcile the existence of loving God with the evident evil that exists in the world has been an issue for philosophers and theologians since the Age of Rationalism began. 

Gottfried Leibniz created a framework to reconcile these seemingly opposed aspects of the universe, while preserving the theological foundations of a Deity of Good.  He called his creation a theodicy, and it was one of the first attempts to justify the existence of God using rational thought, while also creating a framework to explain the evil in the world.  It is different from a simple defense, which does not attempt to explain the existence of evil or even help people understand why evil exists.

There are four aspects of a theodicy.  First, it must provide justification of the existence of God despite the evil in the world.  Second, it must be built from a common sense world view, which means that it cannot draw on obscure points of theology, but must work from common belief.  Third, it must draw from historical and scientific opinion, which binds it into the realm of logical argument.  Finally, the theodicy must be built off of plausible moral principles.

It was one of the first attempts to bring God into the realms of Natural Philosophy.

As this is an interesting theological exercise, in light of the events in Newtown, I would like to build a Theodicy to try to explain the horrors inflicted by armed villains.  I am doing this in response to the disgusting statements of people like Mike Huckabee, who claim that these mass shootings occur because we have "excluded God from the public schools."

Before I build my argument, I must address these statements, because not only are they vile in light of a tragedy that has left twenty small children dead, but also because if that is true, then God is irredeemably evil, and there is little if any difference between him and Satan.

In the Book of Job, God allows Satan to inflict disaster and suffering on Job, to prove that no matter what happens, Job's faith is strong enough that he will not turn away from God nor will he curse God for what has happened to him.  After Job's faith is affirmed, and Satan is proven wrong in his belief that Job only loves God because God has gifted him, Job receives back what he has lost.  While the story of Job is disturbing on a number of levels, in the end God is shown to be just and compassionate.

That is not the case if God massacres children to prove a point.  Unlike in the story of Job, those children will not come back, nor will they be replaced, as were Job's herds.  God simply obliterated them without mercy.

Even worse, if God is sending these things to teach us a lesson and out of anger that we have supposedly excluded Him from our country, how evil must he be to slaughter the innocents to make a statement.  The children have nothing to do with deciding issues like prayer in school gay marriage or any other social issue people want to blame. It is also quite likely the parents who are now grieving did not have anything to do with those decisions either.  To punish people who have done no wrong, and let the actual decision makers remain unsanctioned is an evil beyond belief.  If God is so cruel as to do these things, then God is not good or loving.

Since that is so alien to what I believe about a loving deity, I must reject it and with it I must condemn anyone who uses this sort of disgusting rhetoric to try to sway a grieving nation.  It is an act as evil as the initial massacre. There are things you simply do not do, and one of those is telling a grieving parent that their child died because America allow gays to marry or has taken Christian prayer out of the schools.

Instead, I must look at how this sort of evil can exist in the world, despite an all powerful and all loving God.  And through that exploration, I will try to build a Theodicy.  I do want to state, I am not a true theologian, and I do not know if this is going to be correctly constructed, but I want to try to rationalize, for myself at least, the issue of evil in the world and how God can permit it's existence.  

I am also not going to fall back on the easy explanation that the evil in the world is the result of Satan.  This explanation either neuters God, making him powerless to prevent the Devil from having Earthly reign, or it makes God a defacto accomplice, sanctioning the actions of Satan.  This explanation is what is called a defense, and would have been the rationalization prior to the Enlightenment.  As such, I would like to use a more sophisticated theology.

The core of the reconciliation between evil and God lies in the concept of Free Will.  I have explored this concept previously, in this blog post, but here I want to look at it from the point of view of God.  God gave mankind Free Will  and this means He cannot intervene, even when our actions are horrific and evil.  People make the choice to commit evil acts, and for him to intervene in these instances revokes the very idea of free will.

It is basically similar idea of a parent letting a child chose their path.  As a parent, you can tell when a child is going to screw up their life, but in the end, forcing a child to make the right decision keeps the child forever an infant.  There is no growth without the ability to screw up.  But beyond that, if God intervenes and stops someone from committing evil, the entire framework of Free Will becomes an illusion, because the underpinning is knocked out.

To further explain this, we have to look at the nature of Sin.  To commit sin, there must be two aspects, the decision and the action.  I reject the traditional Catholic view that the sin exists only in the decision, and the action is irrelevant.  If you decide to commit a sin, then upon reflection have recognition of the irrevocable nature of that sin and turn back from the precipice, then you have found redemption, and have not committed a sin.

Similarly, if you sin outside of a conscious decision, either because of extreme need, or being forced to, you have not actually sinned.  This covers the Valjean dilemma; stealing a loaf of bread because you are starving.  It also covers things like the necessity of killing in a war, possibly even if the cause you are fighting for is unjust in the eyes of God.  While the first is sanctioned by most religious authorities, I know that the second is morally questionable, because it skirts the line of the Nuremberg Defense.  However, most people would agree that killing in times of war is sometimes necessary, especially in a kill or be killed situation.

So, outside of the situations that may look like sin on the surface, but do not actually constitute sin, people have the option to chose between Salvation and Damnation.  For God to intervene and stop the actions that are required for the commission of a sin, He actually eliminates the option of Free Will.  At that point, we move into the realm of Predestination, that all souls are destined for Heaven or Hell, regardless of the decisions they make in life.

But why, then does He allow innocents to die.  Can He not contain the evil?  Unfortunately the answer has to be no.  For him to directly intercede in the affairs of man breaks the rules as well.  He would have to weigh the worth of all people, and choose who would live and who would die.  In other words, he would have decide who's life was worthy of being spared and who was unworthy enough to allow them to be killed.

This is problematic on many levels.  First, it eliminates the possibility of redemption.  Perhaps the person is on the wrong path now, but later recognizes the error of their ways and straightens up.  I understand that the concept of omniscience means that God would know if that person would ever find salvation, and of course He could arrange to only have damned souls die in these sorts of incidents, but then that leads to an even more horrific problem.

It means that everyone who dies in incidents like Newtown essentially got what they deserved.  It would mean that everyone who died that day was basically a horrible person who God decided to obliterate.  It also means that people would have no reason to grieve the losses, because they deserved it.  That is the Fred Phelps view of the world, but beyond that fringe, this is an idea that must be rejected.

So basically, God's gift of Free Will means that He understands that sometimes people will misuse that gift.  That is why He gave us the gift.  And further, if he were to intervene, he would either revoke Free Will, or he would make us have no sympathy for the victims, which would irrevocably harden our hearts against people who suffer tragedy.  In this view, Job would have gotten what he deserved and would not be a lesson in faith overcoming adversity.

There is a story about World War Two that is relevant here.  The British had cracked Enigma, the primary code used by the Nazis.  The secret that they had cracked the code was probably the single biggest factor in the Allied victory in Europe.

After the code was cracked, the British decoded that the Luftwaffe was planning to firebomb the city of Coventry, which at the time had almost 200,000 residents.  The attack that was being planned was unprecedented, and would certainly cause massive death and destruction. 

At this point, Winston Churchill had a choice, he could evacuate the city and build up it's defenses, saving hundreds or thousands of lives, but reveal that Enigma was broken, or he could do nothing, let the city be devastated and keep the secret that Enigma had been deciphered.  In the end, he let the attack happen; 800 people died, and thousands were injured.  Most of the city was left in ruins, and in the whole of the war, the only British city to take more damage was London itself.

But the secret was kept.  Thousands were killed or injured so millions could be saved.  Had the Germans known that Enigma was broken, they would have changed the code, and quite possibly won the war.  Churchill later said that the decision to not save Coventry was the single hardest decision of his life, and it haunted him for the rest of it.

In the end, you could say that the horrors that occur in the world are God's Coventry.

God on Line Three

God's calling

Throughout the course of this election, several of the Republican candidates for president have said that they were/are running because God told them to.  The fact that this has been said by more than one person raises some serious problems. 

Assuming that none of them are lying, there are four distinct possibilities, either: God is very fickle and changes his mind about who He wants to run for president as often as I change shirts; there are multiple deities, each of whom has a preferred candidate that they want to run; God really isn't omniscient, and He's hedging His bet by flooding the field with candidates in the hopes that one of them will win; or, to use Patton Oswalt's term, He is just having a naughty caprice, and is actually setting them up for failure, probably for His own amusement.

Any way you look at this, it is a pretty disturbing concept.

But any of these disturbing possibilities are more comforting than the final possibility; the voices that these candidates are hearing, and ascribing to God, are actually signs of incipient schizophrenia.  It is not a good thing for a person with their finger on the Doomsday Button to be hearing voices.  One of them might just hear, "Do it NOW!"  Of course, that could be what Armageddon actually is, a schizophrenic hearing a voice that says to destroy the world.  No actual Deity involved.

But this leads to a larger question; are our Prophets and Messiahs actually inspired by God or are the voices that they hear just symptoms of a mental illness?  Are the great religions of the world actually just the product of incipient insanity?  Do we write these crazy stories, or do these stories make us crazy?

These are questions that I cannot answer.  Perhaps what we call schizophrenia is merely the ability to hear something greater.  For certainty, people who were mentally ill used to be called touched, as in touched by the Gods.  They were our first priests, oracles, prophets.  In ancient society, mental illness was a sign of connection with the Gods.  Later, it became possession by demons, or the Devil himself.  Today, it is a chemical imbalance in the brain, or possibly a misfiring of the cerebral cortex, or something along those lines.  Perhaps we are medicating away God.

Understand, I am not advocating not treating the mentally ill.  With proper medication, they can lead well adjusted, productive lives.  But at the same time, are we doing the right thing for them?  Perhaps we are removing a connection to the Divine, that if we accepted and welcomed, we might find new spiritual avenues.  Perhaps rather than medicating them so that they can hold down regular jobs, and be good little cogs, we held them up as divine messengers, with an important role to play, much as the ancient shamans. Perhaps, given a role that embraces their "illness," they might find themselves to be happy and productive, in ways that we cannot currently imagine. 

This leads to another even more disturbing thought, if Jesus were to come again, or the Messiah to arrive, or any of the religious icons to return to earth, would we accept them, or would we repeat history and imprison or execute them?  Was David Koresh actually the second coming, and we killed him again?  Have we been killing Jesus over and over for the last two thousand years?

And why, when some people, televangelists and Republican politicians, hear God speaking to them, we accept it and put them on television?  Also, why, when people who are not in the upper crust of society, or not trained ministers, claim to hear the Word of God, do we lock them up and shove clozapine down their throats?

Why is one person to be believed when they hear God speak to them and another discounted?

I think the answer comes from the fact that we want God to say what we want Him to say.  If someone is saying that God is speaking to them, and we like what He has to say, we believe that the person is actually hearing His voice.  If they say that God is saying something they don't want to hear, they are just crazy.  It also helps when the person speaking is part of mainstream society, and not from the fringes.

For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of a Roman Governor of Judea.  You have this crazy guy running around, gathering disciples and followers, preaching the world of "God," and generally sowing civil disobedience and discontent with the Empire.  To keep order in the province, you are going to have to stop him, because he is creating a high probability of uprising.  Since long term imprisonment has not been invented, what do you do?  You execute him. 

Unfortunately, for the Roman Empire, this turns him into a martyr, and his movement becomes much greater.  As Obi Wan Kenobi says, "if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

The same thing happened with David Koresh.  I am not saying that I think he was the Second Coming, as he claimed.  I really think he was a megalomaniac, with a messiah complex.  But, in this context, what I am saying is that his preaching and message was construed to be a threat to civil stability, and he was eliminated.

And yet, we allow Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and all of the other politicians who claim that God told them to run for office, to continue to operate.  We do not denounce them as an existential threat to America, despite the fact that their policies would be far worse for our country than the ravings of a fringe preacher in Waco Texas.

And I think it does go back to the fact that we want our Messiahs to be non-controversial.  We don't want them to change the status quo, and because of this, we have bled religion to blandness.  You sill have fire and brimstone preachers, how rise up thousands, or even millions, of devout followers, but they do not preach disruption of the social order.  They have cast God as the Ultimate Conservative, unchanging and unchangeable. 

We accept a Rick Santorum, precisely because he wants to freeze society in ice, preferably in 60 year old ice.  The same goes for almost all of the Televangelists, preachers and self styled recipients of the Word of God.  They want to keep society stagnant, even rolling back the clock in a fit of nostalgia.

But we must remember, all of the prophets and messiahs in history have actually preached radical change.  Jesus was basically a socialist.  Mohammad was also a reformer.  The same goes for Joseph Smith.  All of the religious icons we hold up now as paragons of conservativism,  were radicals in their day.  Each and every one of them upended social norms, preached radical change, and rejected the strictures of the society in which they were operating.

Even today, the teachings of Jesus are pretty radical.  His words hold far more in common with Occupy than the Tea Party.  Obviously, I can't predict exactly where he would stand on every social issue, but given how much he promoted the poor and the meek over the wealthy and powerful, I can feel pretty sure that he would not be a Republican.  (I blogged about this here)

So what is the end result of this?  I have posed a lot of questions here, many of which I don't have an answer for.

But I can say this, if God is speaking to someone, or through someone to the rest of us, it is probably to bring about some sort of change, to cause some sort of growth or development, to lead us to higher thoughts, to transform the world and guide it in that transformation.  Whoever God speaks to will probably be an agent of change.

I doubt He would speak to someone in order to maintain the status quo.

Is This Really Part of the Plan?

God's plan

Yesterday, I watched an interview with a couple who's home was destroyed by a tornado for the second time in eleven months.  Yes, twice in less than a year, they had just finished rebuilding the house when it was demolished again.  Anyway, in the course of the interview, the woman said that "She was sure that this is part of God's plan."

While I'm sure she finds the thought comforting, I was appalled by the thought.  If her tragedy is part of God's plan, that means that God saw fit to obliterate her house twice.  That would be a Jobian level of capriciousness.  And for her to continue to profess love for such a deity implies at the very least an extreme version of Stockholm Syndrome.

I am not trying to denigrate the woman's obvious faith; she is clearly and genuinely devout.  What I am getting at is the idea that many profoundly religious people are suffering from a divine traumatic bonding.  From Wikipedia, the definition of Stockholm Syndrome describes "the strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other."

A while ago, talking with my friend Patrick, we began to question whether pets actually love us, or whether they are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.  Training a pet involves a considerable amount of behavior modification, which a pet is likely to not understand, at least a first.  Their noses get rubbed in poop, they get yelled at, or other things that they find quite frightening.  They come to associate those bad things with certain behaviors in a process that is called aversion therapy.

But despite the behavior modification (or even more disturbingly, perhaps because of it) they still love us.  Most dog trainers will tell you that a dog's love of you is mixed with a healthy dose of fear.  This is not a bad thing in and of itself, because that is how a dog pack maintains it's social order.  All the subordinate members are afraid of the alpha animals.  Therefore, the typical dog both loves and fears its owner, and the owner intermittently intimidates the dog in the process of maintaining their status as alpha.  This is the definition of Stockholm Syndrome.

I would like to point out here, that the average loving pet owner does not realize that they are intimidating their pets, but they are.  At the very least, a pet owner must keep their animal under control at all times, running the preponderance of their waking lives.  Putting yourself in the mind of a pet, you can realize how that control could be intimidating.  Fortunately, the process of domestication breeds acceptance of this into an animal.  They literally depend on us as pack leader.

But to return to my point, are many of the devout suffering from Divine Stockholm Syndrome?

It think that this is quite likely, not necessarily from direct personal experience, but at least through projective identification.  This is where we identify with the experiences of others, and then project our experiences onto them.  We read the story of Job, and then take our own misfortunes in life and project those experiences into him, and consequently identify with his story.  We use our life as a filter to understand his story.

And his story is of a capricious and ineffable God, tormenting a just and righteous man to prove the depth of his fate.

The filter of the Job story (which as my mentor Joe would say, is a Goddamned good book) teaches us that God is unpredictable and erratic, and that no matter how much we love Him, and no matter how blameless of a life we lead, he might still pot off and punish us, for no reason that we could comprehend.  And identifying with this story inspires fear of God, mixed with love of God.  There are many other stories in the Bible like Job: Abraham and Isaac; the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, a classic overreaction to say the least; Jacob and his brothers;  Sampson, the haircut was not consentual; the list goes on and on.

The Old Testament is full of stories of a jealous, vindictive God who acts irrationally, and yet his people still love him.  Before you think that I am just complaining about Christianity, this is a trend in most Western religions.  Look at the ancient myths, and you will see that they are full of unpredictable deities.

I would like to take a minute to look at why deities would be viewed in this manner.  The world was, and still is, a violent and unpredictable place.  Bad things are always happening, and often to good people.  Without science and satellites, the weather is completely unpredictable.  Tornados can appear without warning.  Volcanoes and earthquakes can level cities in the blink of an eye.  Plagues can ravage the countryside.  The entirety of existence is tenuous to say the least.

And the stories we create about the Gods reflect this fragility.  If God rules over the Earth, and unpredictable horrors occur with great frequency, obviously, God is doing it for a reason.  And we work that capriciousness into our definitions of Deity.

And by continuing to love him, despite all of this, we develop Stockholm Syndrome towards God.

I do want to insert here, there are some who ascribe the bad things to the Devil, but if God allows Satan to have this dominion over earth, he is at the least an accomplice in the crime.  Or maybe he also has Stockholm Syndrome towards the Devil.  (I think that may be the most blasphemous thing I have ever written.)

But back to my point, I have talked to many devout people, and their love of God is mixed with a healthy dose of fear; they look at God the way our dogs look at us.  We have been well domesticated.

And through this, when bad things happen in our lives, we defend God, by saying the bad things that happen to us are part of his plan.  Somehow, though it all, our faith is reinforced by all the horror in our lives.  God is capricious, and we still love him.  He inflicts misery on us intentionally, and we react with Stockholm Syndrome.

But I prefer a different way of looking at it.  There is a quote from Babylon 5, which is one of my favorite television shows. In it one of the characters says, "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."

I think it is a healthier way to view the world.

The Case For Soft Polytheism

Truth.

When there is only one truth, there can be no peace.  When there are many truths, peace is possible.

Many social scientists state monotheism is more culturally advanced than polytheism, and is the natural progression of human society.  On the surface, this seems to be a plausible extrapolation – after all, polytheism in the western world was obliterated (or retreated into the shadows) a millennia ago, with the absorption of the Celts.  It would seem, at least from a western point of view that monotheism is a hallmark of an advanced society.

But is it really?  Hinduism and Shintoism are overtly polytheistic, Buddhism, with its Hindu roots, has polytheistic overtones.  I dare say that no one would question Japan as an advanced society, and India is fast becoming a world player.  Although China is technically atheistic, the Buddhist traditions run deep.  None of these countries have become monotheistic as they have advanced technologically. 

Furthermore, the Greeks and Romans were more advanced than any societies that existed until at least the 1700’s.  If monotheism cemented societal advances, the Roman Empire should have reached its zenith, or at least underwent a renaissance, after Constantine.  Instead, the Empire fragmented, the barbarians sacked Rome, and Europe was plunged into the dark ages.  It could just as easily be argued that monotheism destroys societies.

However, since most anthropologists are from the west, enculturation probably plays a role in this statement of societal evolution.  There has been a long tradition in cultural anthropology to practice a rather paternalistic and superior attitude toward the societies being studied.  This is reinforced by the fact that the modern empires have all been Western, even if the cultures subjugated are millennia older than the European countries. 

The reality is that social evolution does not tend toward monotheism as it advances nor does it, in and of itself, advance society.  The two are completely disconnected; we just fall back to the natural belief of the superiority of our own culture, and consequently conflate the two.

The reality is that in order for society to advance as we move forward, we must fall back to what I term a “soft polytheism.”  What I mean by this is, an individual culture may be monotheistic, but they also recognize the validity of other religions and other deities.  This is not saying, “I accept that they worship another God, even though I know that their God is false, but I’ll allow them their own beliefs, even though I know that they are wrong.”  It is actually saying, “I worship my God, and through that God I have found my own personal salvation, but I know there are other Gods that can lead other people to their own Salvation.  No God is better than any other, except on a personal basis, and what is right for me is not right for everyone.”

This is a radical statement, as it goes even beyond what liberal theologians like John Spong espouse.  Their view is that everyone worships the same God by different names.  That may or may not be actually true, but it is better for society to take the issue entirely off the table by accepting soft polytheism.  Saying that there is only one God that we all worship in different ways is actually still pretty paternalistic toward people who profoundly believe that they are multitudes of deities.

In the ancient world, there were no wars fought over the Gods, war was for more concrete issues such as territory, money, trade and resources.  In fact, it was typical for a conqueror to adopt the pantheon of the subjugated land.  An example of this the Ptolomies converting to the worship of the Egyptian deities and building temples in their honor, such as the complex at Dendara, dedicated to Hathor.  Gods were tied to the land, and if someone went to another land where other Gods were worshiped, they typically adopted the new deities.

The Bible, written by monotheists, documents the first incidents of religious warfare.  Except for the Bible, there are few, if any, documented cases of people fighting over the validity of a God.  There are contentions between people, such as the strife between Sparta and Athens that had a religious component, but neither side was trying to convert the other to the worship of their patron deity, they were just trying to prove their God was better, kind of like modern sports rivalries. 

I would also like to note, the Old Testament does not deny other deities, it just commands the Jews to have no other God than YHVH.  The fact that they name their deity, unlike Christians who just call Him God, indicates that they needed to differentiate Him from other Gods.  It is the strict monotheism of the later Abrahamic traditions that dispense with the need for God to have a name.  And by the way, Allah just means God in Arabic.  Arab Christians (yes, they do exist) call God Allah as well.

And it is this latter Abrahamic tradition that has caused so much grief in the world.  When there is only one God, all other Gods must, by definition be false, or worse, the other Gods are actually Lucifer in masquerade.  This then leads the faithful to have to convert the Heathen to give them salvation or literally pull them from the clutches of Satan.  When you view other religions as games or satanic, you cannot hold respect for them, and by extension, for the people who follow them.  It also makes the infidel or heretic among the most depraved of individuals, as they are embracing fakery or evil.

In the end, this belief that all other religions are false will make it impossible to deal with its followers honorably.  In a way, the overt hatred of people of other faiths is better than the subtle paternalistic distain that many “enlightened” people demonstrate.  I saw this same kind of behavior in the South (and also in Boulder) among many “liberals.”  They treated other races with the same sort of kindness I show my dog.  I love him, but I know he is still a dog, and no matter how much I would like him to, he will never be able to understand Quantum Physics.  The pseudo-liberals do the same thing to people of other races and religions; they treat them well, but you can tell that they know in their hearts they are better.  I’d rather deal with overt hatred than this patronizing attitude; at least I can fight against the people who hate openly.

But to return to my point: if we all accept our deity as one among many, we can accept those other deities as good and loving, and most importantly, valid.  This does not mean that we have to celebrate those other Gods, just that we have to respect that they are as worthy of worship as our own.  Many members of polytheistic religions have a single God that they feel the strongest kinship with. 

If each one of us accepted this Truth, we will have bridged one of the greatest chasms that divide us.  If we accept that all religions are good, all of them strive to help their adherents become better people, and their followers are as profoundly devout as we are, we will see true peace on the horizon.

And trust me; this will actually bring us closer to our own individual Gods.

Free Will in Anti-Abortion Alley

Free-will.

Today, driving through Kansas, I drove through what I term Anti-Abortion Alley.  For somewhere around 300 miles of I-70, anti-abortion, pro-life, billboards or road signs appear on average every quarter of a mile.  Given the shear number of signs, they tend to be very repetitive, with the most common three being: “Adoption, Not Abortion;” “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart;” and “Be Glad Your Mom Chose Life.”  There are other signs, but these three dominate.  Some signs are not overtly Anti-Abortion, except when viewed in the context of the other signs.  An example of this would be “Know Jesus, Know Peace.  John 3:16”

Kansas is the Har Meggiddo of the Abortion War, ground zero in the battle for reproductive rights.  It is the home of the assassination of George Tiller, the Westboro Baptist Church and some of the most restrictive legislation enacted since the decision in Roe V Wade should have rendered the point moot.

In this battle, people focus on these questions: “Is abortion murder, is a fetus (or embryo) morally the same as a baby, when does life begin?”

There are no answers to these questions.  The world is not black and white, it isn’t even shades of gray, it is brilliant polychromatic Technicolor.  It is not Kansas, it is OZ.

And Humans have free will.

They have Free Will to find a solution to a dilemma, not from questionable interpretation of a two thousand year old book, but from the circumstances of the issue at hand.  Humans have the gift, or maybe curse, of being able to analyze a situation, weigh the pros and cons, assess the impacts of various solutions, chart a course based on available information,and then follow through with the best option, even if it is the best of a bad lot.

And Free Will is the core of this, and many other, conflicts.

I have had arguments with some Fundamentalists who say, “You have Free Will to make only one choice, and that is to give your will over to God.”

Really?  God gave us free will only to rush out and give it up as soon as possible?  (Like something else we seem to be in such a hurry to get rid of?)

The problem with that is that it is too easy, to pat of an answer, and one not worthy of an Entity dubbed a supreme being.  If God only wanted humans to give up free will, why give it to them in the first place?  I know, the Fundamentalist answer is, “to tempt them,” but to me that is only one small step removed from pre-destination.  If God is omniscient, He already knows the answer to your choice, so He is allowing a large segment of the population to Damn themselves.  At least He is, if that is the limit of choices of Free Will.

I do not think any Deity, especially one that is supposed to be loving, would create such a stark choice.

Free Will is not an easy choice.  It is a choice rooted in contextualism.  What is acceptable in a certain situation is not in another.  In war, it is OK to commit murder, in fact, it may even be worthy of a Medal of Honor.  It is not OK to murder a doctor in the middle of a church, no matter how much you may disagree with the doctor’s actions.  That’s context.

Free will is the ultimate understanding of actions in context.  This is not to be confused with its close cousin, moral relativism.  Context is an understanding that something that may be acceptable in certain, clearly defined, circumstances, may be utterly wrong in a different situation. 

We have free will to make those choices.  Sometimes we make the right one, sometimes we make the wrong one, but unless you are in the situation and understand the complete context, you cannot make a blanket statement about the morality of a choice.

And to further the argument, when you take the choice and the free will away, through legislation or intimidation, you remove the very decisions and judgments that, perhaps, God wants us to make. 

Sometimes, abortion is probably not the ethical or moral choice, sometimes, it probably is.  Its morality is purely dependent on context.  God does not create simple problems.  There are no easy answers, and often there is not a truly right answer, just a best option.  That is life, ethics and morality in a complex and dynamic world.

Remember we live in OZ, the world has color, even if it is sometimes jarring.

There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance

A planet of play things
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
'The stars aren't aligned
Or the gods are malign...'
Blame is better to give than receive

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill

            - Rush: Freewill