A thought on the imposition of freedom.

( My older brother wrote this paper and I wanted to share it with you all!)




For me, freedom means more that just the ability to do what ever you want. It means the having the ability to do what is right. We all want to be free, but only by growing in our understanding of what freedom is can we truly be free. Our modernist and secular society tells us that freedom means the ability to do whatever we want, without rules or restrictions. In fact, freedom is one of the indisputable absolutes in today’s culture. Rarely in America will you hear someone deny that everyone should have freedom.

What is freedom? The relativistic usage of the term “Freedom” is where most of the confusion of what it means to be free comes from. Let me first start off by defining and refuting the secular definition of freedom. The idea of freedom that is currently being pressed into society start off with the premise that God or absolutes shouldn’t have any influence in our law making. In other words, we must make our decisions and laws separate from a higher power, a law above the law. Now that God is out of the equation, it should seem that the ability to do whatever you want should naturally follow, right? Well, let’s see, If we have God out of the equation, then freedom is free to be defined by our society.

But if freedom comes from society, so do the restrictions and laws limiting that freedom. And, by what authority can you claim that people can’t have that freedom taken away from them? For, if freedom and the imposition of freedom into our country is relative to what we think it should be, then there is no reason to obey that concept of freedom because we could invent our own concept of freedom with just as much validity. There is nothing to substantiate our freedom aside from our own arbitrary whim. And if that freedom is ever taken away from us by another society, there is no ground on which we could stand to say that they are wrong for removing our freedom, for that lack of freedom would have the same authority backing it up as our freedom has now. Freedom is pointless.

Now that I’ve defined what secular society believes what freedom should be, I will explain what freedom means to me. True freedom is having the ability to do good. Freedom is a gift from God. And, because God gave freedom to us, we have vindication for this concept of freedom apart from our own inclinations and we have a reason to uphold and respect freedom.


So, What did God intend freedom to be? God wants what is best for us. So he put some restrictions on that freedom. God tells us what not to do in order to tell us what to do. Picture this analogy. A baseball player is trying to hit a .400 batting average this upcoming season. So he hires a batting coach to help him achieve his goal. Now, this batting coach notices a lot of things wrong with his swing, so he tells him not to do the things detrimental to his swing in order in perfect his swing. In this same way, God tells us not to do things harmful to ourselves in order to bring us to heaven with him.

Jesus told his disciples in the gospel of John that everyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin. And it is with this outlook that Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and countless other nonconformists were able to stand up to the wrongs in their society and say with absolute certainty that their laws were iniquitous, and stand up to them with resolution. With this in mind, I look at the law bestowed by God and see that doesn’t limit our freedom, it gives us the greater freedom to do what is right.