What does it mean to be free?

[Agnostic_Gabe]

Cindy,

I read your article found at journeyintotheson.com/2014/03/20/what-does-it-mean-to-be-free/ and didn’t know it was you who wrote the article. Very good post. It caused me to analyze the concept of freedom and made some excellent points. One of the great thing I can quote out of it was

[A person who obeys his every whim and does all his heart desires at any moment, unresponsive to any outside influence, will live in constant torment. He’ll be socially isolated, impoverished, and probably physically ill. If our bodies’ cells did this, we’d be dead in moments.

This was so insightful… Freedom isn’t to do anything I want, Freedom is to do what is right! The cells in our body is such an insightful analogy! Again, great post.
[/quote]

[Cindy_Skillman]

Thanks so much, Gabe. I’m really glad it spoke to you, and thanks for letting me know. I appreciate that.

[Paidion]

Well, obviously having free will doesn’t mean being able to do anything we want. We might want to fly up into the air by waving our arms, but we cannot do so.

The basic position of those who believe in libertarian free will is that a normal adult human being CAN choose to perform a particular act in spite of the many influences upon him to do otherwise.

One definition of libertarian free will:

Person P, having chosen in the past to perform Action A, COULD HAVE chosen NOT to have performed Action A.

[Trey_Tomeny]

Thanks for posting the topic, what an important question.

My guess is that what it means to be free is to be free to die. To have no fear whatsoever. To put everything in the hands and will of God.

And when we have died, God will fill us with HIs Spirit and Love and then we have a new free- we are free to love. Not our own self-interested love, but HIs perfect Love moving through us.

With God fully in us, we are free to do anything that delights Him.

[Cindy_Skillman]

Since people are replying, I’m just going to go ahead and copy/paste the post here that Gabe was kind enough to refer to – for convenience sake, and anyway, it’s short. That way, if folks have comments/discussion on it, we can all share them together.

We Christians (and secularists too) debate endlessly whether we are in fact free entities capable of doing as we choose or whether we’re helpless elements of the universe whose every “choice” is in fact determined by preexisting factors completely beyond our control. Are we water sprites or ripples? Do we respond to the stimulus of a pebble tossed through the surface to create utterly predictable wave patterns, or do we skate over the pond at will?

Theologians fill our libraries with volumes examining this question. Secular philosophers do the same, from their own points of view — but what does it really mean to be “free?”

I wonder . . . are we mixed up on this topic because we have the idea that freedom means license and psychological ability to do absolutely anything we’re capable of doing at any time? Or is such a radical degree of liberty the root of chaos and death? Such “freedom” describes the torture of the mentally deranged, the disorganization and death of a wilderness, the wild reproduction, immaturity and unpredictability of a cancer. Such “freedom” leads inevitably to death.

A person who obeys his every whim and does all his heart desires at any moment, unresponsive to any outside influence, will live in constant torment. He’ll be socially isolated, impoverished, and probably physically ill. If our bodies’ cells did this, we’d be dead in moments. If the universe behaved in a completely “free” (ie: random) manner, it would not exist. Because of the organized (and yet free) dance of the universe around us, an individual person may survive for a time in a state of complete psychic disorganization. He’ll end up in a mental hospital if he’s lucky, a prison if less so, or if he has no luck at all, he’ll soon meet death, whether by his own hand or by disease or by the violence of another. Neither society nor the world can tolerate this kind of freedom for more than a very brief time.

We have a lovely, romantic idea that wilderness brims over with beauty and life, and is natural and perfect just as it is. As a person who lives in what is more or less a wilderness, I beg to differ. Wilderness means that plants and animals go their own ways, fighting with one another for survival. One sort of plant (Ponderosa Pine in our case) overgrows all the other plants to the point of excluding almost anything other than itself. As a consequence, whole forests die from unchecked, specialized infestations, and thorns grow up in their place. Populations of animals ebb and flow in a constant battle between predators and prey, with disease and depredation as a wild card. There is great beauty here, but the beauty is in the organization, and the organized things are the healthy things.

Mankind was deputized to keep the garden, which essentially means to introduce organization, to keep all things in balance with one another and in a state of health and optimum well-being.

Between wilderness and wild garden, which of these states truly embodies freedom and life? Only the garden offers a space for genuine freedom, for all the plants and animals to thrive and live in peace with one another. The wilderness — the way of libertarianism — is the way of chaos and death. If all the residents live according to a higher nature, that is, in love toward one another (not the letter of the law, but the spirit — which is love), then the garden thrives.

Cancer occurs when cells reproduce out of control — that is, in a disorganized fashion. They never mature, but continue to grow and stack up one on another on another in a chaotic mass which is, in itself, extremely viable — until it kills its host. Are the cells free to do as they will? Maybe — at least they’re free to do what’s in their nature. What they “will” is to garnish all the resources of the body to feed their wildly reproductive nature. The problem is, that they’re broken. But they’re doing what they, as broken things, will to do. Is this freedom? Is this the sort of freedom Father wants for us?

WE are broken. Without His guidance, WE are following the will of a broken nature. When we die with Christ, we leave behind that broken nature, that unchecked chaotic wilderness, that deranged and disorganized mind. All these things are bondage. Is it possible that, in conforming us to the image of His Son, He’s lifting us up into the next stage of our development (evolution, if you like) from the merely physical plane into a new freedom? As we are naturally, we’re confined to the physical dimension. When we die with Christ and are raised with Him, we add the spiritual dimension; we become new creatures, learning to live in the life of God, in the dimension of the spirit, rather than merely in the life of the natural, physical plane.

In our new level of life, we no longer desire to do the things that lead to death. Does that mean we’re not free? I suppose you could look at it like that, but in truth, I think it means we enter a freedom the like of which we cannot yet fully comprehend. We enter life. That does mean organization as opposed to chaos, and maybe in our present state we see that as somewhat restricting. I don’t think we’ll see it that way for long though.

A child who learns to keep his bedroom clean and tidy is free to enjoy his room far more than a child who has to climb over piles of toys and dirty clothes to get to a bed he must first clear of books and candy wrappers, more toys and more dirty clothes before he can relax with his new magazine. We tend to resist this kind of freedom just as a child may resist organizing his room. Nevertheless, it doesn’t follow that organized freedom is any form of bondage. In fact, it is maturation (which you remember cancer cells never experience), and keeping the garden so that it fills with life rather than death, and finding true mental stability and peace. It is, I believe, becoming the adult sons and daughters of God — His representatives in the physical universe who have become fit to orchestrate the Kingdom of Light in the realm of disappearing darkness.

[Cole_H]

Being free for me includes loving from the heart (because I want to). When I first got off of drugs it was based out of compulsion. It then later turned into an act to where I don’t do drugs because I no longer want to. I don’t come to Christ out of compulsion but because I want to.

[Agnostic_Gabe]

I read the article again and I still find it outstanding. It really helps put things into perspective. I mean, Freedom is often just a matter of perspective. Why that is important, is because we can re-frame scenarios where it appears like our freedom is being infringed or restricted, when one just needs to shift the paradigm and consider what they are gaining.

Like the room analogy was just brilliant. A kid might think cleaning up his room everything is only a loss… But if he opens his eyes, the gain is right there, he has a clean room to enjoy! He might not forget where he put his toys, or spend countless hours looking for them.

Anyway, just wanted to bump this one again and say that I still find the article great.

[anon12438761]

Here’s one I posted a few years back that folks seemed to profit from.

Spiritual Freedom

There has been a lot of talk, and rightly so, about Free Will on this forum of late. I’d like to shift the focus a bit by giving a few selections on the free ‘mind’ from Channing. It’s only a page and takes 2 minutes to read, but there is a LOT of food for thought. So here goes, from here on it is Channing, not me: It has pleased the All-wise Disposer to encompass us from our birth by difficulty and allurement, to place us in a world where wrong-doing is often gainful, and duty rough and perilo…

[Paidion]

A common error among philosophers is that “total free will” is tantamount to randomness. I think the idea is that if our choices (however we conceive of our decisions) if not based on presumed consequences, then they must be random. Indeed this is the position of the author of the quoted article. However, it does not follow that if one’s acts are not externally caused, they are random. Rather these acts arise from desire, with the origin of the acts being the mind of the free-will agent. If the mind is the cause of an act, then that act is not random.

[maintenanceman]

So Don, I have no idea what that means. Please help.

[Paidion]

So Don, I have no idea what that means. Please help.

If you toss a fair die (plural “dice”) it will come up with one of the numbers 1,2,3,4,5, or 6. We say that the number that turned up did so “randomly.” But your decisions and mine are not random, but are the results of choice. Thus such decisions are the result of free will. It would be a mistake to say that if our decisions are not externally caused, they are random.

[Eleutheros]

Hey!

Semester is over, and I’ve got this summer to catch up.

For good or bad, I’m back (for a while, anyway).

DaveB, what a stunning essay from William Ellery Channing! I’ve never read anything that so well sums up what I’ve come to believe. I’d not heard of him before, so I thank you much for sharing his name.

Way back in 2004 when, with much trepidation, I began writing from my heart on a public forum, I choose a moniker that I hoped might help to convey how what I was then only exploring led me to think, then feel.

I choose Eleutheros because what I was concluding was awakening my heart into an understanding of what Jesus meant when he said:

“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”.

As I read Channing’s essay, my heart resonated with his words like a new harmony played over a familiar melody. That is, it enriched what was already there and made it more beautiful.

This essay now holds a permanent place on the bulletin board of good things in my heart.

I thank you again for sharing this.

Now, I address my heart, and thus my typing, to the topic question, “What does it mean to be free?”

It is believed in popular theology that we have free will, and that this is from God Himself.

But, I ask, “Do we really have free will?”

Or is this ability, “to choose what we want to do,” just an illusion, like the passage of time?

In the context of modern Christian theology - which I perceive as not much more than repeated attempts to reconcile Augustinianism with Arminianism - free will seems to be a term appropriated to get men and women off the hook for their sins through making a one-time-needed choice, while simultaneously giving the believer an ability to placate their conscience with theological conclusions. And, of course, give them the means to think that they are escaping damnation because of what they believe - and what they subsequently do to support The Church (The Institution and its buildings) and win converts to the cause by rescuing as many as possible from hell through preaching the Gospel.

Thus, in Arminianism, I perceive free will as a necessary concept to put the blame for the way the world is on Adam, not Jehovah, so that Arminianism has a means to resist the inevitable (and stunningly fatalistic) conclusion that by the very act of creation, Jehovah must have intended for the world to be the way it is. For doesn’t the Bible teach us that He foreknew the fall of Adam as a fact before He created him? And that He foreknew/chose which human beings were going to be damned for all eternity - and which weren’t - an election that no human being has a legitimate word to say against because the sovereign Jehovah elected all to their eternal destiny from before the foundation of the world was laid?

Of course, In Augustine of Hippo’s theology - which historically replaced the first understanding of scripture, Universal Salvation, in the fourth century to give the developing clergy/laity divide a stronger foothold - free will cannot truly exist if it is a truth that Jehovah knew, from before the foundation of the world, that Adam was going to fall, A biblical fact (in the Vulgate, Geneva & KJV translations) that lead me to logically conclude that the events in the garden were not much more than a Divine Sting Operation.

The understanding of scripture that is now my heart leads me to perceive that the only time we can truly engage an ability to choose good over evil is when we hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If we respond with acceptance, with faith, believing that Jesus Christ came to offer Jehovah’s forgiveness (no small thing, that!) and set us free from sin, we are, “born anew,” and begin the process of growing to maturity in Christ; that is, of learning how to live for the kingdom of God by consistently choosing agape and forgiveness, and thus good over evil. Otherwise, we remain as we are, enslaved to sin, without the ability to please Jehovah in what we do and say (which isn’t a motive in the heart of those who consistently reject the Gospel, but is a motive in the heart of those who readily accept it).

I perceive from scripture that this new ability to subdue sin in our lives through love and forgiveness comes because we are born anew, because we are re-sired by Jehovah through Holy Spirit, Which is the Spirit of Jesus Who speaks to us through the cleansed conscience that He made possible by accomplishing the forgiveness of sins through being the Sacrificial Lamb crucified that he might become our succoring High Priest, giving us the room, through that very forgiveness, to mature in Him through this Thing He calls Grace.

“I call that mind free, which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not live on old virtue, which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour in fresh and higher exertions.”

My summation then of what it means to be free is to say that, by heeding it, our conscience is the thing wherein we’ll catch the heart of The King - because those who are set free by The King… are free, indeed!

Free to grasp and consistently practice the things Channing summed up so well in his eloquent essay on the free mind.

Be good!

Dennis!