On Freedom

I spent a bit of Sunday after church talking to some newly minted friends at lunch. An imminent move put us in the uncomfortable position of saying hasty goodbyes, but good ones. The sermon topic was on Election, a doctrine they (and, I suppose, many other Christians) find somewhat disquieting. A fair description of the doctrine is in Wikipedia.

With scientists identifying neurons related to choice, and quite a lot said about Freedom and Liberty in the news these days, it doesn't seem bad to discuss it some. I think, actually, that the two concepts intersect.


The Bush Doctrine, for lack of a better term, essentially states that democracy (rule by the people) is the ultimate good. It is better, for example, than the sovereignty of nations. It's an international version of Free Will—which today means "the power of contrary choice."

The same definition of Free Will, just in a local sense, is what troubled my two friends at lunch. Self-determination, the power of contrary choice, Democracy in the collective sense. The trouble is that the definition of "free" has somehow become much different than I think it used to be. We think of a "free will" as one that is unconstrained by outside influence, little understanding that the consequences themselves influence the decision.

Freedom is not the power of choice nearly as much as it is the ability to be who you are. (In this respect, the regenerate are not nearly as free as the unregenerate.) And, perhaps more importantly, the ability to do what's right.

What has happened is that we have replaced this notion with the wrong one: that Choice is Right. We have pre-empted the idea of Right or Wrong Choices by simply saying that being able to Choose is the ultimate good, and that anything impeding choice (like, say, Physics?) is evil.

What we find is what Bush found: the ability to choose means very little without a good chooser (the Palestinians did, after all, elect a Hamas-led government).