Friedrich Nietzsche

The Error of Free-Will. At present we no longer have any mercy upon the concept ‘free-will’: we know only too well what it is—the most egregious theological trick that has ever existed for the purpose of making mankind ‘responsible’ in a theological manner,—that is to say, to make mankind dependent upon theologians. I will now explain to you only the psychology of the whole process of inculcating the sense of responsibility. Men were thought of as ‘free’ in order that they might be judged and punished—in order that they might be held guilty: consequently every action had to be regarded as voluntary, and the origin of every action had to be imagined as lying in consciousness (—in this way the most fundamentally fraudulent character of psychology was established as the very principle of psychology itself). [...] Even the priest knows quite as well as everybody else does that there is no longer any ‘God’, any ‘sinner’ or any ‘Saviour’, and that ‘free will’, and ‘a moral order of the universe’ are lies. (1889) source Unverified