First things first –  I’m a baaaaaaaaad boy. 

My spiritual father strongly suggested that I stay away from online conversations having to do with Universal Restoration.

I didn’t. I’m a baaaaaaaad boy.

The discussion I stumbled into was in regards to Biship Robert Barron’s belief in an eternal hell of fire. It eventually turned to the idea of man’s supposed “free will” and his ability to make a free will choice to tell God to get lost forever.  I find the whole idea of “free will” as described and understood by most people to be ludicrous. Toward the end of the conversation, before the administrator locked the thread, I posted this:

Of course, the question is this – does man really have a free will here on earth? And the answer is no. No human being, living with a corrupt, sin-attracted nature, living with deceit from lying pastors and demons, can be said to have a free will. You can’t even say that Adam had a free will either. The only truly free will decision one can make is that one would know completely and precisely all ramifications of the decisions he is about to make. Only if Adam had known fully what sin would do to the world, and only if he had known fully the glory of full communion with Christ/God, can you say that he made a fully free will decision. Being deceived is not an action of the “free will.”

My understand as posted above is in line with the thinking of Thomas Talbot and Dr. David Bentley Hart, who has stated that only when a being is capable of doing that for which it was created is it truly said to be free.  Anything less is not freedom. We were created for unity with God in love. Anything which keeps us from that keeps us from truly being free, just as a bird in a cage is not truly free, no matter how much it’s owner claims it is.

Talbot writes:  Suppose, by way of illustration, that a schizophrenic young man should kill his loving mother, believing her to be a sinister space alien who has devoured his real mother; and suppose further that he does so in a context in which he categorically could have chosen otherwise (in part, perhaps, because he worries about possible retaliation from other sinister space aliens). Why should such an irrational choice, even if not causally determined, be any more compatible with genuine moral freedom than a rigorous determinism would be? Either our deluded beliefs—including our self-deceptions, if you will—are correctable when we repeatedly encounter overwhelming evidence against them, or we are simply not rational enough to qualify as free moral agents.

My point exactly.  Of course, this answer doesn’t sit well with my interlocutors.  I am then told that I am A.) a heretic and B.) not a philosopher:

That man is free is a dogma of the Faith. You are a heretic. You also don’t have any philosophical training and are not competent to be trying to do theology. Thus, the ease with which you are led astray.

Of course, in telling me that I am not a philosopher, my opponent really means that I disagree with the philsophers with whom he agrees, thus I couldn’t possibly be a philsopher. Had I been supporting his defense of an eternal hell and mankind having a free will, he would have been giving me a standing ovation and lauding my intelligence.

I shall give him the first point. I am not trained in “classical philosophy” and therefore am, at best, learning from others and developing my own views. However, if being a philosopher means agreeing with Aquinas, who stated that the redeemed in heaven will see the suffering of the damned and it will increase their joy (Tertullian said much the same early on in the Church), then I would rather be a heretic than to hold to such a morally noxious position. If being a philosopher means that I am not allowed to properly translate the Bible correctly from the Greek, and instead make the words agree with the warped soteriology of the hierarchy of the church to which I belong, then no, I’ll pass on being a philosopher.

You know what? I was born in Decatur, Georgia and raised outside what was in the 1950’s a small rural town named Tucker. I am a country boy, through and through. I find cities loud and obnoxious, filled with con artists, liars, and an assortment of thoroughly disgusting types. In the place where I grew up, a man sealed his word with a handshake instead of 35 pages of legal papers to prove that he wouldn’t cheat on the deal.  A man’s word was his reputation, and his character was known to those people in the town who dealt with him.

No, I’m not a philosopher. I’m a country boy, and there’s something you should know about us:  we might not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, but we can tell when we have been handed a bag of bovine fecal fertilizer and the one handing it our way is trying to pass it off as valuable by covering it in the perfume of an abundancy of high-faluting words!