I thought I'd add my two cents to this discussion.
I am in accord with larc. I believe we have freewill within a deterministic framework -- language, culture, subculture, race, sex, geography, place and time of birth, one's genetic make-up, economic class, etc. These factors, in many cases, are near impossible to escape. They form the lenses through which we view and filter the world, and determine, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the factor, how we interact with the world.
Our development as humans is dependent upon many things that demarcate who we are, what capabilities we have and further determine what possibilities there may be for us. Take nutrition. A malnourished child will not develop properly or to his or her full potential, and severely limits the individual as an adult. Child rearing also plays a significant role. I read a study where it was shown that little or no physical contact between mother and newborn infant prevented part of the brain of the infant from developing normally, the way a child's brain with mother-infant contact developed. These children tended to be less social and less equipped at interacting with other people, and more likely to be sociopaths. What about children born with AIDS, addicted to drugs, Down's Syndrome, or some other congenital defect or disease?
As someone who is fairly proficient in more than one language, I can attest to the fact that a language has a great influence on how one thinks and even what one thinks about. That's what drove me learn a second language in the first place. It determines what I am capable of thinking and saying as well as how I say and think it. A clichéed example is the Innuit people who've got some 100 or so words for snow (I don't know the accuracy of this example, but it will serve to make my point), because in their environment, their lives, and their culture, snow plays a significant role. Being knowledgeable about snow can be a matter of survival, whether it's to determine if it's safe to pass a through a certain place, or to know how old the tracks you are following when hunting. On the other hand, a desert people might not have a word in their language for snow or maybe only one word for snow because in their day to day lives it is of little or no importance.
Environment is also a deterministic factor as shown by the above example. The environment determines what words are formed by distinct cultures in order to describe their world and circumstances, and to communicate as needed with other members of their group. But it can also have psychological effects as well. Take someone who has grown up in the Amazon jungle, who has never seen the horizon, and who is used to being surrounded by trees and plants, and covered by the forest canopy. Then take a plains Indian from North America who knows nothing more than open space, the horizon and the big sky visible at all times. Now have these two people trade places. How would each feel in the other's environment. Would the Plains Indian feel claustrophobic, confined and disoriented? I think so. How would this person react? Would the Amazon Indian feel vulnerable, lost, alone and disoriented in so much openess, and how would this person react?
Sex as well determines much of who and what we are. The so-called battle of the sexes and the difficulty men and women have communicating with each other, even when they are speaking the same language and are from the same culture is an example.
As larc pointed out, one's religion, more often than not, is determined by the religion of one's family. It is the rare individual who does not follow the religion of their parents. And when there is a difference, it is often a matter of different sects with the same religion, i.e. the Catholic becomes a Protestant, the Methodist becomes a Baptist, or the Shi'ite Muslim becomes a Sunni or Sufi Muslim. In other words, the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. In some places in the world, to openly believe other than what is officially sanctioned is reason for arrest, imprisonment, torture, and/or death.
Our physiogomy as well shapes our perceptions, regulating what we can and cannot sense and perceive. We are limited by our senses. There are other creatures on earth that sense beyond our human capacities, seeing better (not just farther and more clearly, but beyond the color spectrum of human sight, i.e. ultraviolet light), hearing better, smelling better and so forth. We have developed technology and machines to sense and measure what we are incapable of, but there is no way for us to know these things experientially, only vicariously through our intellect and our technology. Our intellect as well limits us, not only as individuals, but as a species.
Someone who immigrates from one culture to another can adapt themselves to the new culture (with the ease of such a transition determined by personality, the circumstances under which they immigrated, etc.) while not abandoning their native culture, and can choose to what extent they adopt the new culture into their life. Successive generations will gradually abandon the old culture for the new; the new culture having a stronger deterministic role in their lives. The sociopath can choose to follow the rules of society, even if their is no internal moral compass directing them. But one can't choose one's culture, can't choose to be a sociopath or not (as far as I know, but could choose sociopathic behavior), can't choose to have good vision or bad, be tall or short, to like certain music, etc., etc., etc.
There's seems to be no way to escape from certain deterministic factors in our lives. What is possible is the use of freewill within a deterministic framework, the deterministic framework limiting our freewill.
CPiolo
P.S. DC, I read of a recent cosmological discovery, currently going through peer review (initially the results look very promising), that our immutable laws are not immutable. The results showed that the speed of light has changed, ever so slightly, since the beginning of the universe. This may mean that other previously thought constants may have changed as well.
