Originally Posted by Starman
Originally Posted by nighthawk
You're deflecting....


Not from the fact I originally stated,...The church employed coercion [well prior to and well beyond Aquinas.]


Originally Posted by nighthawk
The issue is free will .


Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
..hence there can be no such thing as church coerced free-will, since the two are contradictory.

Coercion and free will are not mutually exclusive, you have free will to defy coercion. Ask any willful child.

Oh, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith does stop by every few weeks with their hot pokers but I've only been racked a few times.

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Which explains a lot.