Free will such a concept especially with regards to Christianity. As an early Christian I learned about Christ and the bible in a Southern Baptist church. The Southern Baptist believes in predestination, but based on man’s will the predestination is based on the fore knowledge of God’s elect based on their actions and decisions. I could continue in to the entire debate of Calvinism and the views of free will based on Calvinism. In the context of this question though, I personally believe in free will but the choices made can be heavily influenced by their own environment. Let’s use the kids that I have in my care at a residential treatment facility, 90% of my kids come from broken homes, and most often there was drug use by either one or both parents. So their actions are shaped by the environment around them, however they do have the free will to walk away from the life of drugs.   Demeanor does change over time, and also is shaped by environment and life experiences. I can come up with many examples of this, but the one I think is the most powerful was a survey we did to our congregation some time ago. The basis of the survey was to try to find out if we should move from a traditional type service to a more contemporary. The results of said survey was quite different than expected. The younger generations naturally wanted a more contemporary, but then the anomaly comes in. The senior citizens either wanted a contemporary or had no opinion. It was the baby boomers who was adamant about no change, and in light of this survey we actually went (in my opinion) a few steps backwards in developing an environment that is hospitable to the younger generation.   I believe that people are basically good, one of my classes in seminary was writing for ministry, and in that class I had to compare beliefs of Augustine, Martin Buber, and myself. In those comparisons’ the concept of evil came up, something I never gave much thought to. After reading what both Augustine and Buber felt about evil I drew my own conclusions. Evil exists only because we do have freewill, and that evil is simply the absence of God in our heart. I believe everyone is born good, and when they turn from God that is when evil is able to manifest. This does not mean that every Christian is without evil deeds, or every non-Christian is evil.   I question isn’t cultivating the good and weeding out the bad both what society does as a whole currently? Do they not the both go hand in hand? I guess it all depends on the context, if I had to choose one over the other I would say cultivating the good is not only a better use of our time, but should be of a higher priority. If we are able to cultivate the good in people, then over time maybe just maybe we can have more good in this world then evil.