Monday 29 May 2017

Freedom is good (if properly defined)

There aren't many people who sincerely value freedom.

The Left say they want sexual freedom; but what they really want is to shut-down dissent against their program of moral inversion; and many religious traditionalists regard demands for freedom as the battering-ram of apostasy and atheism.

Libertarians do value freedom as primary, but freedom is a means not an end, so liberty-first leaves matters open as to aims; and anyway libertarians are either powerless theoreticians or else they sell-out, first opportunity.

But there is a sense in which freedom really is Man's destiny within Christianity. Properly understood, freedom is agency - which is the real and divine 'self' thinking. To be free is to think from-and-with the divine part of ourselves.

Why? Because only the divine can be free - only the divine can be an 'uncaused cause' - to put it the other way, it is characteristic of the divine that it can think from itself; think not merely as a fixed or 'programmed' process, nor a passive consequence of inputs.

So freedom is divine and it is active - but it can also be seen that freedom is primarily in the realm of thinking; because, as is obvious, what we actually do is constrained by circumstances.

Whether freedom, in this sense, counts as important depends on how important thinking is - and that in turn depends on metaphysical assumptions. Most people's metaphysical assumptions are that thinking is secondary, optional, contingent, dependent on the brain and private to it... and so forth.

My understanding and assumption is that thinking - by which I mean exactly this kind of divine, free and agent thinking - is objective as well as subjective universal as well as private...

Therefore freedom is a part of the process of divinisation, or theosis - by which each Man becomes more god-like.

That's how important freedom is.


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