Do we have free will?

[Buster's Uncle]

-And Christ's ministry made it clear that God gave us a choice whether to believe and live forever.  (I don't know how the seminary talked my brother into believing in predestination - I've actually had these arguments IRL in deadly ernest.)

What I've been trying to say throughout is that the way reality works, the only pragmatic and useful reaction to these questions is to have an operating assumption that the world is real and you have choices.  Predestination and solipsism are interesting questions to ponder, important ones, perhaps, but we do, in fact, ignore them from day-to-day because we have to to function.

[Lorizael]

I'm more concerned about the opposite--the reduction of the brain to a mechanistic phenomenon like any other--for the practical reason that we humans tend to view phenomena as things to be exploited, once we feel we understand them.  It's only a healthy fear of the inexplicable that keeps us from viewing each other as essentially meat.

It might be true that humans who understand that the brain is just a machine will try to exploit other people's brains, but only until we reprogram their brains so that they don't want to do that. 

[E_T]

Although, the Universe does things that does direct you to places and times. 

I recently had an insident, where I had been the instument of the Uniiverse for someone else's benifit, while they were dealing with multiple family deaths...had said the righ things at the right time and the person walked away with renewed energy and spiritual lightening....  For the first part of that encounter, I was the Universe's puppet, while being shown flashes of things, some years past, that had led me to that encounter at that point in time... and I was then released for the end of the encounter, knowing that the Universe trusted me to finish it.  The awesome thing was that I was even shown that at all.. and also letting me know that it was time for me to move on from what and where I was at.