Ryan might find it interesting to review Kevin Smith's _Dogma_.
I checkecd out the article, and Ryan has this to say: ***** Christian morality was flawed because while it gave the individual free will and an inner life, it simultaneously took them away by making God the final arbiter of our destiny. With only a qualified free will, the sense of moral responsibility is also qualified. The moral development of the Catholic cannot be very profound if every time he does something wrong he can go to the priest, say he's sorry and start again with a clean slate. In Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, moral force is experienced as external coercion, rather than the outcome of an inner development through freedom. For the atheist, only freedom can develop the moral sense, while for the Christian, moral authority comes ultimately from without. By denying man his full freedom, Christianity is imperfectly moral in the first place. Only atheism allows for the fully moral man who faces unflinchingly the consequences of his own actions and the inner turmoil and resolution that brings with it. For the atheist, life is terrible, in the good sense that he alone is answerable for all his actions. This moral solitude deepens the inner spiritual life. Hamlet is the archetype of the moral man who must face life without God; indeed, the whole power of tragedy comes from the absence of any external redeemer who might rescue the subject from the anguish of his decisions. *****
Man is condemned to freedom, which he seeks to evade in a bad faith but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being? Ryan sounds very much like Sartre. I'm not very fond of Sartre the existentialist, however. To say that human beings are "condemned" to freedom already implies that freedom so conceived comes from a view that "the absence of God" is a tragedy. I prefer a worldview in which "the absence of God" is matter-of-fact and in which freedom is not diametrically opposed to and separated from necessity.
I think that a historical materialist view of freedom constitutes a break from Kantian attempts to reconcile "free will" and causal determinism (including Sartre's existentialism), which originated in a Christian problematic:
***** [The] sharp divide between phenomena and noumena had a major attraction for Kant in the solution it made possible to the problem of free will. One of the main principles about objects of experience that Kant claimed to prove in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ is that they are all subject to a complete causal determinism. At the same time he maintained that morality requires free will in such a way that its commands can be addressed only to wills whose choices are not causally determined. How then can the demands of empirical knowledge be reconciled with the demands of morality? Kant's answer, in a nutshell, is that both can be satisfied if we are subject to causal determinism as phenomena (as we appear to ourselves and to each other) but free from causal determination as noumena (as we are in ourselves). We cannot be experienced (not even by ourselves) except as subject to a thoroughgoing causal determinism; but since objects of experience as such are only phenomena, it does not follow that we are causally determined as we are in ourselves. As a phenomenon the self is causally determined, but as a noumenon the self of the same person can still be the free agent that morality requires. (Robert Merrihew Adams, "Introduction," _Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason_) *****
Hegel rejected such a sharp dualism ("Reason is not so impotent as to bring about only the ideal, the ought, which supposedly exists in some unknown region beyond reality [or as is more likely, only as a particular idea in the heads of a few individuals," _Reason in History_), and so did Marx, though in a different way. Both for Hegel and Marx, freedom is not the same as "free will." Human beings, as biological organisms and social creatures, are not "subject to a complete causal determinism" either, if causal determination is understood, in a Kantian fashion (as opposed to Bhaskar's depth ontology), to operate at the level of the empirical; contingency encompasses necessity, not the other way around (recall Stephen Jay Gould here). Causal determination is to be understood not as a limiting concept that excludes freedom except a noumenal "free will" (as in Kant) but as an enabling one. We have practical freedom, not despite but because of historically determined ensembles of social relations that we are. Freedom for us means a collective recognition and _transformation_ of necessity. In the practice of self-emancipation, we change sources of determination -- social relations -- from unwanted to wanted & consciously regulated ones (e.g., from unwanted pregnancy to voluntary motherhood, from capitalism to socialism). Not freedom from social relations, but freedom _of_ social relations, or "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
Yoshie