i) For those of you who reject beliefs grounded in the irrational, superstitious, non-provable etc., how do you justify the implicit acceptance of free will which seems to underlie most of the responses here? Or at least those that include reference to you acting and choosing as regards your beliefs and morality, and assuming your theist opposites do the same.

Why should there be an implicit acceptance of free will? "Acting" and "choosing" is a descriptive term for our perception of consciousness. It doesn't mean that these actions and choices are governed by some supernatural "soul" instead of physical laws.

Can one be a Freethinker without free will?

Why not? Is it the term that you object to? Then mentally switch in "Foothinker" every time you see it and perhaps it won't bother you so much.

ii) For those that are logically consistent (at least superficially) to their rejection of the superstition of free will, how do you justify any meaningful claims to ethics? Not that you can justify it, but go through the motions of what we mistakenly call 'justification' as though there was any agent to justify and any meaningful agent to justify to.

Now you are glomming on to our Catholic theologian's bullshit. I'm afraid this conversation is over, because if you don't get it by now you just want to bloviate about your own opinion, which is you need a God of some sort to know Right from Wrong.

Whether we "actually" have free will or not is immaterial. We "feel" like we have free will, and for the purpose of ethics, society, and law, we have to act like it to some extent. Just because free will doesn't exist doesn't mean it isn't a decent descriptive model.

You miss my point, although you do bring up another one, which is that both "free will" and "god" are very slippery terms, and it's impossible to prove the existence or nonexistence of either one either through logic or experiment. And it's hard to get two people to agree what they mean by it.

The difference is, subjective "free will" (at least in the sense that I see it) is something that we all experience that we have to fall back on all the time whether we want to or not. God, on the other hand, is not. You can lose your belief in God and function just fine, but you can't lose your subjective sense of free will while remaining both conscious and sane. Likewise, theories of punishment in criminal law, whether based on deterence or retribution, assume that people can make choices. Whether you believe they these choices are metaphysically "predetermined" or not is irrelevant. If we have no free will in our choices, then we didn't have free will in setting up the system of punishment in the first place. To think about making a choice based on lack of free will is to become Buridan's ass, paralyzed between two haystacks. It's silly.

Also the debate between free will and the lack thereof (the opposite is not necessarily determinism; adding stochastic processes doesn't necessarily turn an 'automaton' into a 'freewillaton') is independent of the god/no god debate, and is a lot less interesting to non-philosophers. There's no churches and clergy devoted to worshipping and tithing free will.

Lastly, your agnostic slur against atheism is a silly bit of nomenclature-based name-calling. You realize that agnosticism is compatible with both theism and atheism, right? Very few atheists are 'strong atheists' with the position that they know God exists. They just don't have the belief that he does.

[oops, I mixed it up where I obviously meant that so-called "strong atheists" take the position that god does NOT exist]

Just as everyone experiences a subjective awareness or sensation of "free will" (which need indicate any actual freedom), everyone has occasional subjectively transcendental experiences, which through human history have been explained by spirits, monsters, demons, witches, ghosts of the dead, gods, the One True God, or the Holy Spirit. This does nothing to indicate whether there is anything "transcendental" about these experiences. Neuroscience suggests that these experiences are biologically based and similar across beliefs (and nonbelievers) and cultures. If anything, that would tend to negate the idea that these experiences are caused by a particular personal deity of one exclusive faith. But of course it doesn't say anything about whether there is an additional supernatural power or effect at work, or its nature if any, which is a metaphysical matter which cannot be "proven."

This is still a three-way race on the Dem's side, no matter how the media (Salon included) tries to paint this as a Clinton/Obama matchup.

Salon, please. You've given more inches to noise-candidate Kucinich than Edwards this cycle, and probably twice as much coverage to christo-fascist Huckabee. Why can't you give the man the coverage he deserves before you have to act all surprised at his performance in the early primaries? Voters deserve to be informed. And of the three candidates on the map, Edwards is the one who has clear policies, is more progressive than Obama and much more so than Clinton, and is overall the best candidate to turn this country around after eight years of Bush.