Free will and the consequences

If there is no free will, then people that do bad things had no choice and therefore cannot be blamed and logically it would thus be unfair/wrong to punish them. 

So we don’t punish them and let them behave destructively?

Or do we behave badly/immorally/evilly ourselves by punishing them anyway? 

We cannot live our lives or run our society’s as though there is no free will, as most acknowledge, without it becoming an anarchic free-for-all sh*t show where only power and money or their lack matters, and morality is infinitely malleable. 

This is what dictatorship regimes do. They try to remove your free will and turn you into obedient robots via propaganda, fear and coercion.

That some societies have gone that way is horrible but we don’t all have to live like that. We have to believe that societies like the USSR, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, China, North Korea, Colombia for example, can be made better by people choosing a different way. 

Contending that there is no free will may make some feel highly intelligent, even wise, but it is a destructive & nihilistic position for anyone to hold in practice since it essentially says that things are how they are because they’re meant to be so and we have no choice but to act exactly as we do. 

I don’t believe this to be true.

I believe we DO have free will and it’s a gift we should be grateful for that we are allowed to choose what we say and do.

That’s what free will is.

We can all choose to behave how we like in any given situation, including behaving badly.

As to our culture and societal norms meaning we have no free will in practice, many people (though not as many as I’d like) change their views about things on a regular basis. We are all capable of getting past our upbringing and seeing the errors, hypocrisies and inconsistencies in our societal norms. The idea that our views are so influenced by our parents or culture or religion or even direct experience that they are set in stone for all time, such that we have no real choice over our behaviour, is provably wrong and a very unscientific as well as depressingly pessimistic way of regarding human cognitive abilities.

To get to the substance of the argument, yes, the gift that is free will goes hand in hand with the issue that some people will choose to do bad things. 

Furthermore, luck is automatically a by-product of a world of free will since what I choose to do or not do in any instance affects others in often unknowable ways – see Chaos Theory. 

People’s choice of behaviour and its repercussions for others (luck) happens for good or bad trillions of times daily, although thankfully the good/kind/honourable/friendly deeds of people toward each other massively outweigh the bad across the globe as a whole. 

Does that mean we should ignore bad luck and bad behavioural choices? Not try to reduce the bad in the world? No, of course not. We should do what we can to minimise it. 

Atheists want us to believe that there is no God, or certainly not a loving interventionist God, because if there were, God would have created Heaven here on earth.

They say that bad things happening proves God doesn’t exist or some hedge their bets by saying that He might exist but He doesn't intervene or (still bet hedging) if He does intervene He doesn’t always do so when we decide He should and therefore isn't loving because of the instances where free will and the luck that goes with it ends in bad results for people.

By this reckoning, even a single instance of something bad happening to someone who did nothing to deserve it proves the point.

A single instance out of trillions of daily actions and interactions between people across the planet is all you need for this view to be right. Indeed, in this perfect saccharine world, where a loving caring God existed, no-one would ever do anything that anyone else could complain about in even a small way. God would not need to intervene since he would have so rigged the system that intervention would be unnecessary.

Would anyone ever die bringing grief/sadness?

Would anyone ever be born with all the difficulties of pregnancy and the pain the woman goes through giving birth?

In this atheist idea of a loving God world, there REALLY would be no free will because people would not have the ability, the choice, to do anything selfish or mean or unkind.

Our world would be like an online game with all the parameters for each character set so rigidly that every action and consequence would be known in advance and only good would ever be done or ever be a consequence of anything done. 

Indeed, no-one would do anything much at all because so much that we do can affect other people in a way they don’t want, creating unhappiness, and we can’t have that in a loving God world, can we atheists?

This is atheists wanting us to believe that there are only two alternatives: a) there is no God, or b) certainly not a loving interventionist God, because if there were, God would have created perfection, i.e. Heaven, here on earth.

Everyone is happy and everyone is good and everyone is kind and nothing bad or painful happens to anyone, ever, and everyone has everything they want all the time. 

EVERYTHING is perfect ALL the time! 

We all seek Heaven where peace and contentment reigns perpetually but we differ on how and when that Heaven is obtained. 

Perhaps how we live our lives here on earth, however long or short, however pleasant or unpleasant people’s choices or dumb luck makes that, is how the perfection we seek, how Heaven, is obtained. 

I choose to think so. Atheists choose not to. Fair enough. 

I have a further existence of some kind to look forward to, atheists have nothing. Again, fair enough. That's up to them.

Because we have free will, we all have this choice to make freely about what to believe concerning the creation of the universe and whether or not some part of our essence continues after our body dies. 
But I know this; I wouldn't want to live in a world where there was no free will. Where everything I and everyone else was going to do or say was pre-determined.
What would be the point of that?
Why make a second Heaven? What would be the point?
This mortal free-will existence may decide how our essence continues and may make us appreciate it more if we are fortunate to attain the real Heaven.

Only time will tell who’s right and who’s wrong and by then I suspect we’ll both be past caring.