a mental disorder can make a person be depressed similar to how a stomach can make a person hungry - ie, that you can't just oppose these desires via willpower. if I don't want to be hungry, but am hungry because i haven't eaten, i don't consider this a violation of free will. The desires of the stomach overriding the desires of the brain still result in my will making the choice to be hungry since my stomach is part of me. I don't want to be depressed, but a disease wills that i be depressed, so i am depressed. I don't consider this a valid argument against the existence of free will since the disease is part of me, so that part of me that is the disease is still exercising control.

It's not a free will argument. It's a statement about "desire." I don't think you have adequately expressed the concept of "desire" if you place an emphasis on what actually happens.

You were responding to Zumby:

I don't think it's enough to say that the person is lying if they are doing X even though they don't want to. This doesn't seem to adequately capture the statement "I did not want to do X" as a statement of desire. Specifically, it's not enough to point at X and say "See? He really did want X because that's what he did."

Without a meaningful concept of "desire" it doesn't really make sense to use it as a tipping point for a separate argument regarding "free will."

Sure, but why can't I re-interpret that dichotomy to be a metaphor for my "primal me" and my "higher me" or some such.

When I say, "I knew it is wrong to steal (the cheesecake) but did so anyway," I'm saying something like "I knew it is wrong to steal, but the temptation was too great and I stole anyway." A religioulsy inclined person might rephrase that as "my spirit knew it was wrong, but my flesh prevaled".

On a more general note, I'd be suspicious of most attempts to develop the distinction of flesh and spirit into anything "serious". Little good (easier interpretation of some scripture) and lotsa bad (devaluing of the body; defective view of our spiritual/cognitive self) can come of that.

that's not the claim. This is only a means to show a possible resolution, not a necessary truth.

ie, its possible to have both 'i didn't want to x but i did x' and 'free will' if the 'i didnt want to x' only expresses your conscious desires, when there also exist other unconscious desires that also control your will.

it doesn't work backwards like your statement "see? ..." because it could be also be possible that sometimes you become hungry not because your stomach made you but because god made you hungry and in fact violated you free will in the process. there may be no way to tell the difference between a violation of free will from an outside source and an unconscious desire enacting your will.

there certainly isn't anything stopping you from interpreting it metaphorically. However when you write "the temptation was too great" what does it mean differently in that case?

It seems odd to me to suggest that the dichotomy between flesh and spirit shouldn't be taken seriously. It seems to me that it's quite important in the new testament

- The discussion with Nicodemus about the Spirit
- That God must be worshipped "In Spirit"
- That the Kingdom of Heaven is "not of this world" (and other references to the Kingdom as well, such as it being within us)
- In Gethsemane
- Romans and Galatians explicitly
- It seems important to me towards an understanding of the gift of the Holy Spirit after the resurrection, or at least I don't understand how that could be taken to be metaphorical only, and any understanding of it certainly requires some metaphysical exposition (if only implicit) of the subject

Which is not to say that it has to be interpreted along the lines I've laid out, but it seems fairly serious to me. It's not a metaphor that is thrown out once haphazardly, it's a consistent theme.

You don't have to link temptation with the physical body. Which, at the very least, leaves the way your "spiritual self" and your physical being interact, unresolved - and thus removes the danger of overpressing metaphors.

Sure. What I meant to say with "seriously" was roughly "once you take a dichotomy and develop it into full-fledged ontological dualism". Once you do that, you just have to take Gal 5,19ff and you're on the fast-track back to Augustine.