You always give thoughtful and eloquent responses! You're the kind of reader many a writer here on steemit hopes for.

I can agree that there's an element of fear in anger and hatred, because without fear (or threat) hatred and anger probably become mere amusement. I hope though that's not interpreted in the wrong way, where fear somehow illegitimizes the concern, like "fear of gay people" etc. Some fears are legit, like fear of Hitler's rising power before everything became evident. Amusement is sometimes peddled as the superior man's default reaction to everything, as though he's supposed to be bereft of any fear/hatred etc., which is ridiculous.

About being "incapable of parsing the full extent of meaning", I view meaning as any other discipline. Touching it doesn't mean solving it completely. I don't see why we should be specks when it comes to meaning but hills when it comes to, I don't know, medicine. If we can figure out that the universe began with a big bang, we can make strides toward demystifying meaning, too.

About determinism, I'm afraid, as I've already stated in the comment you read, it's considered solved! ) If you believe we are 100% material beings, and a rock that is also 100% material has no free will, there is no point at which added material complexity creates free will. Free will is not an emergent property. There's no way a material thing, no matter how it's organized, can suddenly cease to obey all the same laws of nature that any other material thing obeys. I always find the following question helps to clarify things and people's intuitions, and gets at the core of the debate: at time x-1 (i.e. whatever time in the past), if everything had been exactly the same, could you have done otherwise? Given the same neural makeup, all the same experiences, influences, everything exactly the same, is there any chance you would've chosen differently? This is essentially the same as asking if a coin toss could ever yield a different result than the one it did the first time round, had everything else remained exactly the same. I don't see how or why the answer could differ depending on whether we're talking about living or non-living things, given that one is a materialist.