Free Will

Carl Jung, one of the early pioneers of modern psychology, wrote this from his years of experience as a therapist: The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of ...

You ought to.” “You need to.” “You’ve got to.” “You’re supposed to.” “You better.” Do these sorts of exhortations sound familiar? Perhaps you have heard admonitions such as these from the pulpit, from...

Holy One, on this night we remember Jesus gathering with his disciples for a Passover meal. You have delivered your people from slavery, and you call us to celebrate. Tonight we give thanks for the lo...

Modern man is a bleak business. To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...

The atheist author Richard Dawkins, who wrote, “The universe, at the bottom, has no design, no purpose, no evil, and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor care...

I love watching young boys and girls build things with Legos. Their small, creative masterpieces cannot help but reflect their image-bearing nature and remind us we were all made to make things. When ...

I once was significantly lost. When I was a college student in northern Wisconsin, my dad and I were hiking on a trail that was somewhat familiar to me. I had been on this trail just a few weeks befor...

There’s a story about philosopher John Dewey walking with his young son on a cold, wet, and windy day. The boy, barefoot, was gleefully splashing in a puddle despite the weather. A concerned friend pa...

“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it...

Remove grace, and you have nothing whereby to be saved. Remove free will and you have nothing that could be saved.

The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will. .

We have to believe in free will. We have no choice.

The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. . . . If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone.”

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

Let all the 'free-will' in the world do all it can with all its strength; it will never give rise to a single instance of ability to avoid being hardened if God does not give the Spirit, or of...

Free will is the power of choosing good and evil.

God knows all things. . . . The things he knows are partly divine and immortal, partly perishable and temporal. . . . His knowledge of uncertain things . . . cannot be different from their nature. . ....

God never coerces anyone. He treats human beings, not as blocks of wood, but as intelligent and moral beings.

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing mora...

Free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give [creatures] free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodne...

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will then we may take that it is worth paying.

The greatest gift that God . . . made in Creation, and the most formidable to His Goodness, and that which he prizes the most, was the freedom of the will.

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

Our freedom is our supreme dignity; that makes us children of the Most high; we can enjoy it only by living in a partly chancy world.

God saves by persuasion, not compulsion, for compulsion is no attribute of God.

The story is told of a group of theologians who were discussing the tension between predestination and free will. Things became so heated that the group broke up into two opposing factions. But one m...

I infer that God's decrees, and the necessity of event flowing thence, neither destroy the true free-agency of men, nor render the commission of sin a jot less heinous. They neither force the huma...

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.