This is the problem: F≠S≠HG, since these are separate and unequal entities.
How's that a problem? I'd say the problem is as I delineated it - mutually exclusive claims. F≠S≠HG isn't irrational. Nor is F=S=HG. But F=S=HG and F≠S≠HG is.
it requires a total giving up of self interests to that higher goal, which men trapped in materialistic tendencies, tend more to rebellion than acceptance.
I determine my goals myself. The religions don't have our interests in mind, seem to know little about human nature, and know nothing more about gods or right living than anybody else. Theists run to this trope that they're materialistic whenever dealing with people not into gods and angels. I just saw something analogous regarding sexual behaviors of people not constrained to the options religions offer. It was called "anything goes" sexual morals. Yeah, if one doesn't accept religious commands to confine sex to heterosexual marriages, he has no standards at all - anything goes. Religions don't define how we should think or live unless we let them, and why would we? Sorry, but as a humanist, I have no more respect for your way of living than you do mine. Why would I take life advice from people who believe by faith? I already have better ideas that what they recommend yet cannot give reasons for.
That answers the entire quandary humanity faces, the quandary of choice. Otherwise God, with one word, would make us all beleive.
Well, I have a more coherent idea than that. There are no gods or commandments. You're forced to defend the idea of a tri-omni god in the face of evidence that it doesn't exist, and so you come up with tortured apologetics to explain why a deity that could program sinless behavior into people if it could doesn't do that - yet another of the dozens of enigmas for the believer that evaporate away with agnostic atheism.
This is the most misunderstood aspect of free will, one where people blame God for warning us of the consequences of our rebellious actions.
That is not the most misunderstood aspect of free will. The most misunderstood aspect of free will is the difference between free will and the illusion of free will and the inability to devise any test that distinguish between them. We all experience considering options and then choosing one, but is that chosen freely or is it determined and only feels freely chosen, or, in other words, could we really have chosen otherwise. In the case of free will, if we could reproduce every aspect of reality at the time we made the choice, we could choose otherwise the second time. In other words, would such a person put back into the EXACT same situation sometimes choose one way and at other times another, which is what I mean by free will - undetermined will - or would he always make the same choice and never realize that there was never any possibility he could choose otherwise, because his will is determined, but feels free.
It gets worse. The question is unanswerable, because every time he goes back to the same EXACT circumstance, he goes like he did the first time with no memory of having been there before or even that he is conducting an experiment, since such knowledge would make subsequent tests invalid. He's not in EXACTLY the same situation the second time if his mind has a memory not present the first time.
And it gets worse yet: It doesn't matter what the answer is. Life feels exactly the same either way. What if we discovered for an iron-clad fact that there was no such thing as free will - just the illusion, just the feeling that we could have chosen otherwise, but now know that that is an illusion. Perhaps a device is created that accurately predicts what people will choose before they choose it, and your every choice is known by others before you know what it is. That might be very upsetting and disorienting at first, but what would we do differently if faced with that as reality? Whatever was foreordained. I think I know what that would be for me, since I've already thought about it as if it were the case.
It's analogous to discovering that the outside world doesn't exist. Suppose you somehow could know for an iron-clad fact that you were only a disembodied mind living an illusion. All these years, whenever you stuck what you thought was your finger into what looked like a flame, you felt the pain of fire. Now you know that that was a n illusion - there is no fire or finger, just the illusion of same - so, you do what you used to do as a test, and it burns anyway as it always did before. you were on the way to the kitchen to make a margarita when you discovered this new reality. What do you do differently now that you have that knowledge? Nothing, once done freaking out because you don't have a body. But then you remember - you never did. This is not new. The rules don't change. Let's see - what was I doing? Oh yes, getting ready to mix a margarita. It's just as enjoyable knowing it's an illusion. Have two. The tequila is low, but you know where to get more.
Of course, none of that is thinkable to the theist who is wearing a faith-based confirmation bias. He doesn't permit himself to go there. Most are simply not free to join along in this philosophical journey, this thought experiment. They drop out as soon as the scenario contradicts their faith. Rather than wonder how they would deal with situations, they simply refuse to think about them, which is part of the reason ideas like these are so misunderstood, or more correctly, rejected out of hand before they are understood. The theist is generally fairly skilled at not understanding other points of view
