>>Good morning John;
>>
>>Great topic! I wish we could sit down and discuss this in great detail!
>>
>>You are here on earth and your presence has assisted others. That is commendable. I believe that we should help others whenever possible. Help comes in many forms. The greatest form of helping others that I have personally been involved with is to save human lives with my own hands.
>>
>>I try to look for the good in the world. Sometimes it is difficult but I still try. Help yourself, your family and then the rest of the world. Do so in that order. If you do not help yourself you cannot help others. To not help your family is inexcusable! To help others in the world is a blessing.
>>
>>Tom
>
>Oh, I agree, it's a good thing to help others. But, the point I was making had to do with whether or not we have free will. I think true free will would have meant I could have chosen to not be born. After that, I believe you have free will to choose between all the religions or not.

Okay, I'll jump in. Can't help. Guess no free will. :)

I assume you have only brought the whole issue forward from an intellectual point of view and that it's not depression or something like that that drove you to mention it here.

A whole bunch of neurologists indeed doubt whether we have free will in the sense that it's the I who decides how we behave. An example they use: Our hand is scratching the head even before we even get aware of the fact that it's itching. So, even before the person could decide whether or not he wants to scratch, the hand has already moved to the spot and will have started to scratch. These neurologists claim that most decisions on how to cope with situations are made by the brain seconds or milliseconds before we - eventually - get aware of the problem. Their research suggests that the number of true free will decisions is really quite limited.
And there's a whole bunch of psychologists who claim that many - if not all - decisions that we claim to be the result of free will are influenced by social-psychological pressures and our bio-chemical state.

Is this all relevant with regard to what you bring to our attention? I think so, because, while I think that there's still enough room for the idea that a human has at least some free will, it must not be forgotten that free will requires awareness and awareness requires a brain. And a brain is what you did not have before you were born. Ergo, there was no way you could have decided to choose to live or not. It's that simple.