Freedom

FREEDOM IS NOT LICENSE. The ability to choose between good and evil is not the ability of human beings but is a divine right possessed by God alone. We can only falter and fail at our inability to possess what God alone possesses. What is good and what is evil? Did not our first parents fail at this same temptation? A temptation wrought by the serpent of Eden that turned our patrimony of light and life into one of darkness and death. There is much evil in the world because of it.

Now, the knowledge of what is good and what is evil has become for us a kind of punishment because our very beings rebel against us at what we know to be good and delight secretly behind our backs at what we know to be evil. The only consolation to be had is a return to an innocence we have already lost, something that Jewish observance, Christian baptism, and Islamic submission restores to the hearts of those who are true to their own Lord, to their own souls, to their own community, and to our own common humanity. Real happiness is not a pretense and so it can never be sustained by lies. Those who are truly happy know it and so they are happy not because we are we but because God is God and we may only live in the common hope that perceives for us what happiness truly is by first believing what it is not.

Freedom is an essential requirement of happiness. Freedom is the ability to choose to be happy. Freedom will resist the choice to be unhappy but it can not distinguish between the illusion of happiness and the form of true happiness because it relies also on the allied strength of other virtues to combat evil and to help us persevere in the good. The truest expression of Freedom is not a secular ideal, it is a divine provision intended as a guarantee of happiness and exists in the context of all the other gifts, virtues and fruits of God given to men who are of God. To take freedom away from it's original context and make it into a tool of blind choice is consequentially very dangerous, indeed. It will soon blunt the will of nations. For no choice either right or wrong will allow freedom itself to fulfill the hope that itself does not possess, and the soul of men know this, because where the pursuit to become happy become futile, many are afflicted by a strange unhappiness even while possessing the wealth of the earth, yea even the wealth of the universe entire, for they were all, in truth, really denied the inesteemable value of God's gift of true freedom.

A freedom which, like all God's gifts, may never be used for anything more or less that what the Divine Giver has intended to give, and who is to doubt the unsurpassed generosity of this Divine Giver from Whom all men have received everything they are and have and will be, truly one must have to willingly and openly tell a boldface lie to be able to stand in front of many and say that one have received from God nothing, that person might as well cease to exist and take his lie with him.