Seeking Freedom

What is freedom? We tend to define freedom as the removal of any restrictions in order to pursue our inclinations, our inner self - that necessary ingredient for authenticity and self-fulfillment. New Ager, Shakti Gawain, author of Creative Visualizations, would agree:

·             "When we consistently suppress and distrust our intuitive knowingness, looking instead for external authority, validation, and the approval of others, we give our personal power away…Every time you don’t trust yourself and don’t follow your inner truth, you decreased your aliveness and your body will reflect this with a loss of vitality, numbness, pain, and eventually physical disease."

Truly, dependency upon others and their opinions hands us a life of bondage. Freedom  must be made of a different material. Gawain suggests that this is the self, the source of trust, life and vitality.

Is the self the source of freedom or of bondage? Let me offer a very strange sounding answer. Freedom is living in harmony with reality. It’s like kayaking down a swift river and not against it. It is conforming to the ebbs and flow of the river. It is recognizing the dangers and skillfully avoiding them, as we go with the flow.

When we resist the flow, we foolishly ignore the laws of the river. It’s like ignoring the threat of gravity, as we walk too close to the edge of a precipice.

As strange as it sounds, freedom is conformity to certain laws that can harm us if we violate them. Ironically, we maximize our freedom by staying within our proper confines, like the goldfish in his bowl. If he jumps out to seek more freedom, she will find she has less, as he squirms helplessly on the ground.

We need limits - certain rules or laws. Without them, it is like playing chess where “anything goes.” This might sound like perfect freedom – you can move the pieces wherever and whenever you want – but such a game will very quickly become boring. Instead, it is the rules or limitations that give meaning to the game.

We cannot do without limits. Without the limitations of gravity, we cannot dance. However, according to Gawain, freedom is a matter casting aside all of the rules and laws. Her only reality is our “inner truth” and desires. While these also constitute reality, they aren’t the only reality.

Reality is greater than the self. We weren’t made for a solipsistic existence. We were made for relationship, however messy this might sometimes become. We were made for give and take, to learn the reality of the other and to enter into it.

This requires understanding. Any relationship requires understanding certain human laws. Even keeping a goldfish requires us to understand the needs of the  goldfish.

What represents the greatest threat to freedom? Internal bondage! As a college student, I found Gawain’s ideas appealing. I quickly adopted nihilism (a form of moral relativism – the denial of any “external authority”) as my guiding light. I initially felt the thrill of liberation. I was no longer bound by the ideas and opinions of others. I was free to find my own path and pleasures.

However, I found that bondage wasn’t so much a matter of external pressures and expectations, but rather, internal ones. After I had thrown off my external shackles, I was left with the ball and chain of my own inner requirements!

The self, which was supposed to liberate me, proved to be a vicious jail-keeper. My own standards – Gawain’s “inner truth” - were more demanding and unforgiving that even society’s standards. I was a prisoner to these requirements, and they tightly bound me with guilt and shame when I failed them. What had promised liberation had enslaved me further.

The filmmaker, Martin Scorsese similarly confessed:

• Some people say it's just a Catholic guilt, that's all. But it's still guilt. I don't mean guilt from being late for Mass or for having sexual thoughts. No, I'm talking about guilt that comes from just being alive.

Guilt is a ubiquitous freedom slayer. It charges that there is something terribly the matter with us. Consequently, we find ourselves coerced to obsessively defend ourselves against its charge. We bath ourselves in denials, rationalizations, and even accomplishments, hoping that these will wash away the indictment, but they never do, no matter how good we act. Instead of freedom, we are embroiled in obsessive inner struggles.

Meanwhile, the Bible lays out a very different path to freedom, not through the “inner self” but through another - a Man who died to make us free:

• If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8-9)

At the Mercy of the Idealists and their Utopian States

Although many Christians are being persecuted and even exterminated in Muslim countries, religious persecution has become the established practice in five nations of the world still committed to the idealist, progressive vision of creating a workers’ paradise. I’m talking about the atheistic-communistic “paradise.” (Even though China continues to persecute their Christians, I will not even mention this country, since it is arguably no longer communistic, leaving only four communist nations.)

The worst offender is North Korea:

• Wednesday, October 9th, 2013: This week several prominent defectors from North Korea will be testifying in front of the UK parliament on the horrors of life inside the "Hermit Kingdom." Their stories of incredible loss and escape from the world's darkest nation have helped the UN Human Rights Council for the first time establish a record of the atrocities still being committed today by the Communist dictatorship. Although this report does not mention it, North Korea is also the world’s number one persecutor of Christians. To own a Bible is illegal and we know of at least one individual in recent years who was executed for distributing Bibles. Thousands of Christians worship in complete secrecy and thousands more are imprisoned in some of the most horrific conditions on earth.

• Monday, October 7th, 2013: The President of the United States could decide to impose sanctions upon organizations or individuals in North Korea that participate in the mass persecution of Christians. North Korea is believed to have as many as 70,000 Christians locked up in labor camps around the country. Owning a Bible is illegal and punishable by life in prison or even summary execution.

The conditions are so deplorable that these internments are almost equivalent to death sentences. What is so threatening to the authorities about owning a Bible? If atheism is so patently reasonable, as atheists allege, how could the Bible represent a threat to them? How ironic that atheist-communist idealism should consistently produce the most unbelievable horrors and the most repressive societies. Laos is another of the four:

• Friday, September 27th, 2013: Across rural areas of Laos reports are coming in of Christian communities being pressure to give up their new found faith in Christ. Those who refuse are threatened with forced eviction from their homes. Animism, or the worship of the natural world, is a traditional belief system for many villages in Laos. Last year report also emerged of Christian community leaders being arrested and held in stockades, despite the fact that the Lao constitution guarantees religious freedom.

• Saturday, September 7th, 2013: As one of the five remaining Communist nations on earth, Laos continues to treat religious minorities with contempt. In rural areas Christians, especially newly-converted Christians, face intimidation and harassment at the hands of local authorities. Late last month a large group of 11 Christian families were told they must "recant" their Christian faith or face forced eviction from their homes.

Why is it that atheism-communism is consistently associated with dehumanization and repression, more so than with any worldview? There must be something endemic to it that has produced such uniformly hideous results. Cuba is now heralded among some communists as the communist “success story.” However, this isn’t the portrait that reality has painted:

• Tuesday, January 15th, 2013: The Apostolic Movement, a network of Protestant Churches in Cuba claims that the Government is threatening to destroy Church property and threatening the family members of the Church.  Christian Solidarity Worldwide says, “Once again we call on the Cuban government to uphold the religious freedom of all its citizens and to instruct government officials at the national, provincial and municipal levels to cease their harassment of the Apostolic Movement and other religious groups.”

• Monday, January 7th, 2013: There has been a “dramatic increase in religious freedom violations” happening in Cuba in 2012.

• Friday, January 18th, 2013: Christians in Cuba were optimistic when Raul Castro took over from his brother, Fidel Castro, as the country’s supreme leader in 2009. But three years later, their hope has turned into disillusionment.

Vietnam also persecutes its Christian population:

• Thursday, October 10th, 2013: In recent weeks tensions have skyrocketed between Catholics and the Vietnamese government. Much of it was spurred by an attack by Vietnamese police on September 4th that injured dozens of parishioners peacefully protesting the unlawful arrest of two fellow believers. The Communist Party of Vietnam maintains a very uneasy relationship with the Catholic church and regularly tries to repress protests by members.

• Tuesday, October 8th, 2013: In July, International Christian Concern (ICC) received a tragically long list from a well-placed contact in Vietnam. The list contained the names of 63 Christian pastors and church leaders who remain locked up in deplorable conditions in four prison camps around the country. The prison sentences received by each are staggeringly long, ranging from five to eighteen years.

Each one of the four nations that remain communistic persecutes their own people. Each one of these “progressive” bastions suppresses freedom of expression and liberty. Each of these “paradises” brutally represses contrary opinions. Why then aren’t our Western progressives repulsed by this universal failure of atheism-communism? And why has this top-down philosophy become so thoroughly mainstreamed in our universities and other Western institutions? And why aren’t its horrors deplored among honest people?

And Some Call it “Islamophobia”

Perhaps just as revealing as what the media reports are the stories that it refuses to report. Sometimes, the media is cowered into silence by charges of “Islamophobia.” (Once in a while, the media will courageously take a stand.)

This tendency is most clearly demonstrated by the medias’ refusal to acknowledge the extent of the Muslim genocide of Christians - Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan are most newsworthy.

One step down from this is the reluctance of Western Europe to report on the explosion of Anti-Semitism within their midst. Wikipedia reports:

• Antisemitism has increased significantly in Europe since 2000, with significant increases in verbal attacks against Jews and vandalism such as graffiti, fire bombings of Jewish schools, desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. Those incidents took place not only in France and Germany, where antisemitic incidents are the highest in Europe but also in counties like Belgium, Austria and the United Kingdom. In those countries, physical assaults against Jews including beatings, stabbings and other violence, increased markedly, in a number of cases resulting in serious injury and even death. Moreover, the Netherlands and Sweden have also had consistently high rates of antisemitic attacks since 2000….A large number of violent antisemitic attacks in Europe were done by Muslims. 

These Muslim attacks have also received encouragement from their host nations that routinely accuse Israel of crimes against the Palestinians. Even more recently, it is reported that:

• Although the full study is not due to be released until October, the salient facts have been summarized by EU officials and by researchers like Dov Maimon, a French-born Israeli scholar at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Among the findings: more than one in four Jews report experiencing anti-Semitic harassment at least once in the twelve months preceding the survey; one in three have experienced such harassment over the past five years; just under one in ten have experienced a physical attack or threat in the same period; and between two-fifths and one-half in France, Belgium, and Hungary have considered emigrating because they feel unsafe. Statistics from my native France, home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, go back farther in time and tell an even darker tale. Since 2000, 7,650 anti-Semitic incidents have been reliably reported to the Jewish Community Security Service and the French ministry of the interior; this figure omits incidents known to have occurred but unreported to the police. 

The Jews are not just considering emigration, they are actually in flight and in droves. Surprisingly, I could not find any stats detailing the extent of Jewish emigration from Western Europe. However, in an article dated March 14, 2013, the Tablet Magazine gave some indication of the extent of French Jewishemigration:

• A few weeks ago, an article chronicled the growth of a French Jewish community in the United Kingdom. To accommodate the influx, St. John’s Wood Synagogue in London started hosting French-language Shabbat services. Here’s one about the French Jews arriving in Israel at a rate of 2,000 per year. 

This is human suffering of immense and ongoing proportions, and the media is largely ignoring it along with the Western governments, which seem to be more interested in ensuring that everyone has access to condoms. Even Jewish groups are hardly raising a whisper.

Perhaps Islam does constitute a threat that needs to be identified. However, this is the very thing that the West is trying to prevent. Currently, France is bringing criminal charges against a journalist for questioning Islam.

However, if Islam is bent on imposing Shariah Law wherever it goes, thereby either subjugating or killing everyone else, as many Koranic verses actually require, then this must be confronted. As the situation now stands, it’s like trying to counteract the bubonic plague without first being allowed to identify the problem.

Waiting for God, even through the Tears

Thirty five years ago, a young man made an altar call. He was very troubled about his new life in Christ and prayed:

• Lord, I’m willing to serve you, but I just don’t see how I can. I don’t have any desire to serve. It all seems too burdensome to me.

He made this same altar call on numerous occasions. Not only didn’t he have the desire to serve, but he also felt entirely alienated from other Christians. They seemed to think differently than he. Their experiences didn’t match his own. It felt as if he occupied an entirely different world from theirs.

This also contributed to his sense of isolation from Jesus and his doubts that he was even saved. All of this tormented him, and he wondered why his new found Savior wasn’t answering his prayers. Was there something irremediably wrong with him?

He was sure that there was. He had suffered from years of depression and panic attacks, and it therefore seemed that either God really didn’t love him that much or that He couldn’t do anything about his weaknesses.

However, imperceptibly, things began to change. Jesus told a parable about growth. He compared it to seeds that grow by themselves without the knowledge and assistance of the farmer (Mark 4:26-28). It didn’t matter whether the farmer remained awake or asleep, this mysterious growth would continue. And it has!

Surprisingly, now there is nothing I’d rather do than to serve my God. I am consumed by this endeavor. Every joy I have is somehow connected to this occupation. Every hope is enslaved by it. However, this doesn’t mean that I no longer have struggles. In fact, He continues to give growth to His seed through my weakness (2 Cor. 12:9-10), even my incomprehension (2 Cor. 4:1-11).

Consequently, I remain a man of many weaknesses. I struggle with my highly negative, irritable, critical, anxious and angry nature. This hasn’t made me easy to live with; nor has it made me the ideal husband. For years I’ve prayed that I wouldn’t be so negative towards my wife and instead cherish her as the precious gift God had given me.

Oddly, I’d feel very tender and warm towards her when we were apart, even for a few hours. She would appear so lovely to me. But when we’d reconnect, I’d find that the spell had been broken, and I was helpless to change this.

However, the seed of God’s planting continued to grow and the warm glow I’d experience when we were apart began to invade our times together.

How could such a thing happen? Certainly not by my manipulations! It happened as I sleep; it grew even as I doubted.

Why do I write about this now? To glorify our Savior and to pass onto you the encouragement of the Psalmist:

• As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till he shows us his mercy. (Psalm 123:2)

Just wait for Him! Praise the Lord!

A Letter to a Moral Relativist

Thanks for your thoughtful response. You are correct that we Christians also place a very high regard on human “well-being,” but ultimately, because our Lord does. Yes, we too are wired for empathy, but we regard empathy, not as a freak of evolution, but as a gift that God has placed within us to guide us fruitfully in love. However, if we thought that empathy was nothing more than a bio-chemical reaction, we might be inclined to ignore it or drug it out.

However, you too seem to regard empathy as more than a chemical reaction. You seem to have established “well-being” as a non-negotiable objective absolute. We certainly do (with various qualifiers, of course). We embrace the golden rule as more than just a feeling or a reaction but as truth, God’s truth.

However, it puzzles me as to why you’d take this principle as objective truth, especially in light of many other alternatives that, without God, seem to be equally defensible:

1. Survival of the fittest – “I’m #1!”
2. The equal value of all living things, including roaches, viruses, the bubonic plague and bacteria.
3. Or suicide to rid the planet of our destructive influence.

You cannot disqualify these three other views without appealing to a higher absolute moral authority, which your atheism prevents you from doing. Instead, you have made “well-being” into your final authority without any rational or authoritative basis to do so. Without a higher authority – court of last resort - your position is merely a dogmatic one. Consequently, you can have nothing of any substance to say to a Hitler who feels that the greatest good is to genetically program the human race, eliminating those people regarded as sub-human.

Meanwhile, the Christian can make an authoritative case from conscience, because the conscience isn’t a biological accident but the wisdom of God. Admittedly, this case might not be persuasive to the atheist, but it is logically coherent.

This is more than just an academic question. At the heart of it lies our very rationale for being moral and living meaningfully. If your concept of “well-being” is no more than something that feels good to you and provides some pragmatic value, then you will find that there is no sufficient reason to live accordingly once your feelings change and you find it more pragmatic to cheat or join in with the gang.

Also, I think that you will find that history informs us that successful cultures have been those who have believed in a right and wrong that is embedded within the texture of reality and not just in our own feelings. Can you cite any such culture that has denied that transcendent truths are foundational to morality and yet has prospered?

Compromise Kills, Divides, and Will Destroy the Church

 I marvel that there are well-intentioned Christians who support same-sex marriage (SSM). To support this institution is also to support gay adoptions and to deny the rights of Christians who refuse to participate in this practice.

SSM is also a doorway to the entry of other destructive, anti-social institutions – pedophilia, transgenderism, the removal of any form of sexual distinctions, and the persecution of people who disagree.

Those Christians who favor SSM argue that continuing these culture wars is not good for the church. They wrongly suppose that if we affirm SSM, we will have peace with our “progressive” society. However, there will be no peace without complete surrender of everything central to the Christian faith

Historian Thomas Kidd reports:

• [British] Parliament approved gay marriage earlier this year, but it allowed dissenting churches to opt out of performing same-sex weddings. That exemption irritates activists and civil partners like Barrie and Tony Drewill-Barlow, who are suing the Church of England to force all ministers to conduct gay weddings. Barrie Drewill-Barlow explained that “it upsets me because I want it so much – a big lavish ceremony, the whole works…I am still not getting what I want.” (World, October 5, 2013, 64)

Evidently, he has no concern about what others might want. There is no peace, and there will be no peace until the church is entirely compromised and rendered indistinguishable from “progressive” society.

However, meanwhile we are wounding our God-given conscience in a vain attempt to find acceptance in a hostile world, where Jesus warned:

• "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. (John 15:18-20)

What then are we to do? Jesus warned that worry can become our slave-master. Instead, we have to maintain right priorities and trust that our Lord will provide:

• But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:33)

But how do we seek Him first? By remaining faithful to His Word – His commands and teachings:

• We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him. (1 John 2:3-5)

Fundamentally, we are not called to be successful, popular, or respected; we are called to be faithful, even when faithfulness proves costly. We have no choice. Paul warned that when we violate what we believe, we injure both ourselves and our relationship with God.

• But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin. (Romans 14:23)

Paul warned that when we encourage our brethren to do something that they do not believe is right, they are “destroyed” because of us (1 Cor. 8:11).

Our nation has broke its constitutional contract with the very people it has pledged to serve by revoking religious freedom. The State has coerced religious institutions to violate their conscience to service gay marriage. It has required Christian businesses to pay for services and even perform services that violate their religiously guaranteed rights, to their own destruction. Some Christians have already elected to surrender both business and vocation to this onslaught rather than choosing compromise.

What will happen when the church is required to perform gay marriage? It will tear the church in two!

We must not put our hope in man or even in our Western institutions. They are capitulating as clapboard buildings before a tsunami (Jer. 17:5-7). Our trust must be in God alone (Psalm 62).

However, this trust does not preclude seeking justice. It is precisely because we trust in God that we trust that He will empower our words and hands. It is because we trust God that we endeavor to cry out for our persecuted brethren.

If we trust Him, we will do what He says! What does He say? He tells us to let His truth shine through us (Mat. 5:14-16). He tells us to love our brothers, and, by doing this, our oppressors might come to believe (John 13:35; 17:20-24). He also promises that the justice of our cause will eventually prevail:

• Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun…For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land. (Psalm 37:5-9)

Threat, Thugs, and Capitulation

How were Hitler and his National Socialist thugs able to take over Germany? Through intimidation, violence and murder! How were Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Castro able to prevail? Through the same instruments of terror! How is it that Islam is now enjoying the protection of Western media, universities and government despite their many atrocities? How is it that anyone who speaks against the Islamic threat and terror is labeled an “Islamophobe” and silenced? Their willingness to act out violently has made cowards of our Western institutions and has even convinced them that they are performing a righteous act by accommodating to Islam.

How is it that the homosexual agenda has suddenly gained such widespread acceptance, gaining such support that anyone who resists them is termed a “homophobe,” a hater of gays, a denier of human rights? Through intimidation and violence! In fact, I just received a sample of their methods today in the form of two anonymous responses to my blog:

• Oh eat a bag of cock go devour a pound of shit you judgmental homophobic redneck cunt. I hope you sit on a cactus.
  
  
• OH YOU ARE A GIANT DOUCHE FAGGOT YOU ARE A FAGGY QUEENY DOUCHE YOU NEED TO GO FUCK YOURSELF CAUSE NO ONE ELSE TOUCHES YOU!

What did I do to deserve such intimidating messages? Much as the Center for Disease Control, I cited various studies in an essay entitled Homosexuality: the Costs.

Such methods of intimidation are not foreign to the pro-gay community. I began listing some of the many instances of pro-gay intimidation, but I stopped. These few incidents would simply trivialize the extent of their violence. Then I tried to include all the incidents I could find on the web, but I deleted them. There were just too many to read.

However, there is nothing surprising or newsworthy that there have always been thugs and bullies who have resorted to the use of any tactics to get their way. What is more surprising is that our democratic institutions that are supposed to expose intimidation and other forms of criminality have all capitulated, even many on the right.

• Fox Sports Southwest fired football analyst Craig James for supporting traditional marriage. (World, October 5, 2013, 8)

Even more surprising, the Mormons – and they had contributed heavily to the passage of the recently invalidated the 2008 popular vote in favor Propositional 8 in California, limiting marriage to male/female unions – had recently invited a couple to speak in favor of making their church “more welcoming places for our LGBT brothers and sisters”:

• Officially the LDS church says marriage is between a man and a woman and that same-sex relationships are sinful, but the church was a quiet force behind the new Boy Scouts policy to allow into the program homosexual boys. (World, October 5, 2013, 12)

I’m sure that the Scouts always had youth with gay proclivities. However, this ruling opens the door to gay behavior and sets the stage for the anticipated argument:

• The gay youth in the scouts should proportionately be matched with gay scoutmasters.

Meanwhile, the Scouts have already had many problems with sexual abuse. However, what is most shocking is the Mormon capitulation. In the wake of the passage of Prop 8, the pro-gays were able to obtain lists of supporters and harassed them, even desecrating their churches. Instead of challenging this threat, they have conveniently seen the politically correct light.

This reminds me to the advance of Hitler’s National Socialist thugs. Albert Einstein had observed their surprising onslaught:

• Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced.  Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . . Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s Campaign for suppressing truth.  I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

There are no longer many lovers of freedom. They have been silenced by the threat of consequences to their careers, their possessions and even their lives, and the thugs have been encouraged by it.