Look, I agree with what you say in principle, but free will needs to be trained. I'm No.1 fanboy of Mandela. He is the most extraordinary world leader of my brief time on earth.
We need to be sceptical of most beliefs claimed as truth. Not so much science because one way or another, even a layman can find a simplified insight into complex evidence.
The Bible was never meant to be taken as literal. Sure there are literal passages, literal motifs of morality and building a life of virtue for one's self, but these are few and far between and even then they are laced with symbolic imagery. If we simplify free will to good and bad, then taking Genesis, as a prime example, especially in 2021, as literal, this is bad, this is a sin.
To exercise one's free will in this case to contradict the most hard won evidences for evolution and natural order is a choice for bad, it's a sin, because G.d and Creation do not hang on literal or symbolic interpretations. Religion requires a person to, without fear or favour, seek truth for what it is, not to appease some Governing Body, or religious authority. Now there may be mitigating circumstances, such as, metal illness, fear, events in life that create a greater need to belong to a religious group no matter what they teach, rather than seek the truth, etc.
All depictions of G.d are products of human imagination, though some are so immoral, so blasphemous, so unjust, that certain religious beliefs become the antithesis of the whole purpose of religion.
Free will is not overstated, I believe, because it is the only tool we have to navigate a life into a valued state.
