[guesswest]

OK I think you're misconstruing a few things here, both with what I said and with the issues involved with these topics generally.

If you envision god as omnipotent and the creator of all things, the starting point of determinism would then be the will of god. God's will, whether you're a determinist or not, cannot be determined by definition, because he is the starting point. There is nothing before god if god is the creator, so nothing can determine his will. Any chain of reactions needs a preceding reaction, and in the theist model that primary action is god.

I'm not sure what you're saying about randomness giving autonomy - that's not what I said. I can choose to swerve into oncoming traffic, I won't do, but I can - here the 'can' has a very different meaning to the 'won't. It is necessary that god 'can' be active in future events, even if he won't be, and you're right that he presumably will have no need to be since being omniscient he isn't going to get things wrong. But the 'can' remains important, because if that's not present then he is not omnipotent. In fact, he'd be entirely impotent, since there's nothing he could do.

As far as the soul goes, I agree it's a fuzzy definition, hence my being a determinist. But I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss it, there are whole schools of philosophy that revolve around these issues, with a lot of intelligent people making persuasive arguments.

And RE your last edit. What people mean when they say that is this: if you had will that was in no way reactionary, then you wouldn't be able to interact with anything. For instance I could not freely choose to type this message because doing so is contingent on external variables (eg me having a computer, keyboard etc). Therefore (they argue), if the idea of free will is to have any meaning, it must be reactionary, but have a sufficient number of self contained variables that it is internally more potent than externality. In that sense consciousness can be divided into an internal collective interacting with the externality, and when that internal collective is potent, as it is in humans, free will emerges. Some people call that internality a soul.