I think people do have free-will, although belief that God is sovereign makes some sort of predestination/determinism impossible to avoid. The question is, how far does predestination go?
To followup on what I already commented:
It is the opposite - in that the lack of faith and the lack of belief in God is what damns each person to their predetermined destination.
It is like I have a young child who wants to use illegal drugs (wants to sin) and so I tell my child the future (I prophesy) that the drug use will destroy their life, that they will waste their money and loose every chance at love and they will get in trouble with the Police and the drugs will send them to an early death and grave.
The only thing my child can do to change that predestination prophesy is if they repent and stop doing wrong and start doing right and THEN after they repent their life becomes unpredictable as it opens up into a defferent kind of world and a different kind of life.
See - I do not make the negative prophesy happen to my child, and neither does God make the negative prophesy happen to humanity, and yet our sinful fate is doomed with no way to change or to choose otherwise until we choose to REPENT of our sin(s) because that opens the door out of our predestination.
Therefore there is no true choice out of our predestined lifelong doom, until we literally and correctly repent and escape from it.
I've changed beliefs a couple times over the course of my life, and even tried to reject religion completely, but I kept being drawn back to Quakerism.
I too attend with the RSoF, under the BYM.
I remember a few years back, reading a theory that some people's brains are just hard-wired to believe, and those people basically can't just decide not to believe (they are not the only ones who can believe, but they are the only ones who can't not believe). -I have concluded, after my repeated unsuccessful attempts to reject religion, that I am one of those people. (don't get me wrong, I like believing, but sometimes I get tired of a lot of what's done in the name of religion).
I agree that some people are destined to believe just as some are destined NOT to believe, but both still do have the option of repentance and to chang their destiny.
One would think that a believer is thereby superior to the unbeliever but I find that to NOT be accurate.
To believe is not enough, while not believing does not condemn the person.
Long ago I use to believe in God but now I know about the reality of God and it is no longer a belief, and there is a very vast difference between knowing and in believing.
Belief is for the immature and for those who do not seek after the truth, while knowing is a maturity based on hard and determined research and experience.
As such both the believer and the non believer still have to repent, or else they are each still trapped in their sins and still predestined to their same prescribed destiny.
