Can never get enough free will

Well, yeah, it might be going over old ground that you and I have read before, but this "long read" in The Guardian about the philosophical and scientific argument about the existence of free will is very good.   

Buddhism gets a mention too, and as it happens, I decided to start reading Karen Armstrong's 2000 biography (of sorts, given the lack of clearly authentic source material) on its founder while I was in Sydney last weekend.  (I read her book on Muhammad too, many years ago.)   Stylistically, I think she's a very good writer.   I'm not always sure that some of her points are valid, but she's a pleasure to read at all times.

Anyway, the free will article mentions Buddhism in this context:

This is what Harris means when he declares that, on close inspection, it’s not merely that free will is an illusion, but that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion: watch yourself closely, and you don’t even seem to be free. “If one pays sufficient attention,” he told me by email, “one can notice that there’s no subject in the middle of experience – there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own.” This is an idea with roots in Buddhism, and echoed by others, including the philosopher David Hume: when you look within, there’s no trace of an internal commanding officer, autonomously issuing decisions. There’s only mental activity, flowing on. Or as Arthur Rimbaud wrote, in a letter to a friend in 1871: “I am a spectator at the unfolding of my thought; I watch it, I listen to it.”

There are reasons to agree with Saul Smilansky that it might be personally and societally detrimental for too many people to start thinking in this way, even if it turns out it’s the truth. (Dennett, although he thinks we do have free will, takes a similar position, arguing that it’s morally irresponsible to promote free-will denial.)

Not sure that I have thought about this much before, but I guess you would have to say that Buddhism is the religion most consistent with the free will sceptics, or disbelievers, or whatever they like to be called.   But then again, if you go to Mahayana Buddhism, with its bodhisattvas taking the similar role of the  Catholic equivalent of the Communion of Saints, you could hardly say that it's very consistent with a lack of free will.   

Mahayana Buddhism seems more fun to me, anyway.  That's how people choose religion, no?