choice

It’s not that hard to understand you. 🙂 You are wrong because you are confusing influence with determination. Free will is when you determine and not someone else, but there can be influences on you (there always are). Punishment and reward are influences, not determinations. These are means that help you choose correctly. Sometimes they balance biases in the other direction (because sinning is pleasant or beneficial or profitable, so punishment and reward balance this bias). But regardless of the balances, free choice does not assume the absence of bias but the absence of external determination. I have expanded on this in my books on the science of freedom and in the corresponding article here on the site. There I also explained that influences not only do not contradict the choice but are what give it meaning. A choice in a vacuum is not valuable. For example, the determinations that it is good and bad in themselves constitute influences on my choice, but without them all of this has no value. See the series of columns 126 and onwards.