Liberty - True and False

Liberty is directly related to, and cannot be separated from, the primary purpose of man’s existence and his life on earth which has been defined by Christianity as the responsibility ‘to know, love and serve God here on earth and to be with Him for ever in heaven’.

To any thinking person, it is inconceivable that man is born and exists merely to work, develop the earth, reproduce, and enjoy what life has to offer and then die and totally disappear without a trace.

It is inconceivable to a thinking person that the universe and all that it contains, the visible and the invisible world, in all its wonderful splendour and complexity, appeared and developed by its own power, that it ‘evolved’ from lower forms of itself. Such a theory is an insult to man’s greatest attribute, his intelligence, his power to think conceptually, a power that, when logically applied, totally rejects the theory.

Liberty under Christianity’s definition is a human right justified by that responsibility referred to above, justified by that primary purpose of human existence.

Like all human rights, liberty has certain limitations, limitations that define and prevent its abuses.

The above definition of man’s primary purpose of existence is only loosely related to the American ideal of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ which can be regarded as more a humanistic than a spiritualistic ideal.

To know, love and obey God necessitates that we first know Him. To know God, we must know the truth about Him - the truth which induces us to love Him and to serve Him as the necessary manifestation of this love. ‘If you love Me, you will keep My commandments’.

In previous generations, the definition of ‘the common good’ was accepted by nearly all civil governments and the general public as conforming to the general concept of the Natural Law, the Divine Law inscribed into all human souls by the Creator, the ROM, the inborn ability to use one’s intellect and sensory mechanisms, to know what the Creator expects of us in a general sense.

Man’s overwhelming problem over the generation has been his failure to always and fully accept the authentic source and the authorized promulgator of spiritual truth.

We know clearly from Scripture that Christ founded a Church to which He gave the authority to preach and teach the eternal truths, in general and in the detail required under the changing circumstances of man’s journey through the generations. ‘He that heareth you, heareth Me’ and ‘I shall send the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who will teach you all things and abide with you forever’.

In recent generations with widespread rejection, mostly because of the naturalistic evolutionism nonsense, of the concept of a Creator who imposed a Natural Law, adherance to such a law has been honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

Modern man has chosen to ignore and disregard the claim to authority presented by the Catholic Church as derived from the above mandate and has elected to go his own way using his own personal concepts of what is good and what is evil. Such personal opinions are, of course, very susceptible to lying propaganda and the weight of public opinion.

This has led, naturally, to the State in some countries, eventually claiming for itself in the name of its citizens, the right to decide what is good and what is evil. According to the United States and other governments, homosexuality is now good and homophobia is evil, the choice to abort the unborn is now good and opposition to abortion is evil, public pornography is now good and banning it is an infringement of free speech and personal liberty and therefore is evil, religious pluralism is now good and – in Sen. Metzenbaum’s words - Christianity is evil.

In our times, abuses of liberty come under two main headings – Totalitarianism and Libertarianism. The former refers to the situation where an all-powerful state defines, controls and abrogates to itself the conferring of all human rights, including that of liberty. The totalitarian definition of liberty relates, not only to human behaviour but also to human thought processes, concepts and beliefs. It attempts not only to define all human rights but also to create new ‘rights’, rights that are not justified by any legitimate human responsibilities, phony rights such as – ‘reproductive rights’, ‘abortion rights’, ‘homosexual rights’ and many forms of so-called civil rights.

For several decades this form of abuse of liberty has been paramount in the Communist countries. It is now being promoted and enforced in the so-called ‘bastion of democratic freedom’ the United States. The United States Government, the Congress - with some honourable exceptions - and the Judiciary, promote and protect the spurious ‘rights’ referred to above
and castigate and punish opponents thereof as guilty of ‘hate crimes’ and ‘political incorrectness’.

Another abuse of liberty is represented by libertarianism. This is the paradigm that insists that there should be no limitations on man’s behaviour or beliefs as long as ‘these behaviours and beliefs do not harm others’. On the face of it, this sounds very reasonable. However, it also leaves to its advocates the liberty to define the nature of the ‘common good’, to define what behaviour and beliefs can harm another. Such definitions are not always compatible with the true ‘common good’ as defined by Christianity, by the Church that Christ founded and to whom He gave custody of spiritual truth.

Libertarians may allow the Church to place limits on freedom as far as the Church’s own adherants are individually concerned but will violently oppose the Church placing such limits on social behaviour - in the political, economic and sexuality spheres.

When the Church places limits on the use of liberty/freedom, it is castigated by libertarians as an enemy of freedom. In actual fact, it is a defender of true freedom. True freedom will perish if its natural boundaries, its natural limits are set aside. Freedom without limits gives way, sooner or later, to anarchy, to social collapse, to the lawless state and - in reaction to that state - to dictatorship, to the totalitarian state, to the final and total loss of all freedom.