freewill

I've been on a bit of a religion kick lately. I love the political stuff as you know, but I think I realized that the root of so much of what I'm against comes from religion, sorta. Its not the actual words of the bible or anything like that which creates the problems. Its the fact that religion is one of the greatest sources of power in human society. If you hold sway over the devout then you can control or at least heavily influence governments and even corporations. All with nearly zero chance for anyone to argue with you. As long as you can find a passage or two in that big ol' book that justifies your stance you can be for or against anything with no repercussions. The only thing that will get you in trouble is something highly immoral in your personal life, and this is where its exactly the opposite of government and corporate officials, their personal lives can be ignored if they are good at their job, a preacher (or any other title for the same thing) cannot disassociate personal and private life, they are to be living the life all the time. I do find it interesting what is considered absolutely unforgivable, calling for the execution of a foreign leader vs. Sex with a hooker. You bang a prostitute and your done, especially if your high on meth and that prostitute is a dude (hagert) but if you simply say that the democratically elected president of another country is a dictator that should be killed by American forces, well a few people will be upset but your followers will cheer (robertson). I just looked at my title and realized that this was going to be about how can you have an omnipotent being outside of time and space who not only has seen every thing that has ever happened, but has also seen everything that will happen, and have freewill. If its already known what will happen to you then you can't have freewill. But this is an old argument, the counter to it makes no sense to me, but it works for those who say it and thats all that matters. Which leads me off to another direction entirely. Ever see the movie "Thank You for Smoking"? Its quite good, but there is a point where the father is teaching his kid how to debate, the father never proves himself right, he simply proves the kid wrong, ipso facto he is right. the kid says but you haven't convinced me, and the father says I'm not trying to, I'm trying to convince the people out there. This is an important fact to keep in mind when arguing with people about something as big as religion. If the person believes strongly enough that they will debate you, then nothing you have to say is going to change their mind. The only thing you can hope to do is maybe convince someone who was still on the fence. The other thing you can accomplish if your really good, is you can get the person to question themselves even just a little. If you can get someone to take a hard look at their own values, then your doing pretty damn good, hell if you can simply get someone to think, at all, your doing well people are very stubborn to the idea of actually using their brains.
So back to my original point about religious leaders, its a hell of a gig. You don't need proof or evidence of anything, although you do need those passages from the book, then you can bend other wise rational peoples morals till they think its acceptable to scream God Hates Fags at the funeral of a soldier who just died in Iraq. Actually I take back that example, there is no possible way that the Phelps family was rational at any point. This is still a good example of the power of the church in general. I'm all for free speech, but can you imagine trying to do that same protest without calling yourself a church? You'd get lynched.
I totally lost my train of thought on this one.