There is something merciful I think to the self knowledge that I nor any of us are infallible. Neither I nor you are made for such a burden. So with some joy and lightened heart I am warmed by the thought that perfection is not our calling. We have a permission to share in our own foibles and have sympathy upon our errancies, which we are called to declare for ourselves and understand in others. So if I may indulge your pardon--
Does Freedom require religion and conversely does religion require freedom? This central theme in the Mitt Romney speech Thursday last has struck a mighty cord, not so much for being novel to the American experience, but rather for being so ably articulated to a modern audience. For many the maxim seems intuitively self evident, but for some it appears down right silly. The former position is correct.
That is if we believe in free-will. And this seems like a proper place to begin such a conversation. To reach back further we’re in another type of discussion altogether. Any conversation on freedom, on religion, on their intrinsic value to each other is rather mute without the concept of free-will. Which is to say we are all men and women of faith (in the broadest sense anyway), even Richard Dawkins, or what else is he saying when he speaks of rising above our nature, otherwise meaningless, unless invoking the transcendent.
So it goes, or rather from the vantage of free-will the idea of Religion as such permits an evaluation not dependent upon particularities but rather on the quest for meaning.
Religions, objectively speaking, are the codified morals, instructions, considered meditations of men of good will who have had a long and vigorous conversation within and over time. As such religion has two predominant purposes: 1) to build and instruct the individual conscience such that it fits in the societal, cultural, and group conscience; 2) to prepare the individual for liberty as instructed by conscience. Embracing God is after all an act of Free-will.
We might say that conscience is the place holder for liberty.
It seems clear that for religion to be vibrant, to administer its obligations, it must be free to converse within its own creed and to converse in the free-market of ideas. That is men and women of good will must be free to explore their understanding without being inhibited by the state because as man is an inquisitive fellow, to deny him access to metaphysical transcendent inquiry, is to deny him that most fundamental right and impulse: his quest for the meaning of himself.
So it is that single religious states deny man’s search for meaning and thereby admit a fundamental lack of faith in their own religion. To propitiate their doubt they invoke the penalty of the state, and perniciously, religion becomes an arm of the state, if not the state itself: Free-will is not something beautified but is rather vilified.
The word of God is infallible but the words of men on their understanding and concept of the words are not; to suggest otherwise is to bump up against idolatry.
Religion when acknowledging God acknowledges free-will and consonantly, cannot properly exist without freedom.
Freedom as it embraces the definition of Man must embrace religion, or in fact it contradicts itself as an ideal and makes of itself a farce.
From Beethoven's Ninth (translated)
Joy, thou source of light immortal
Millions, myriads, rise and gather!
Share this universal kiss!
Bothers in a heaven of bliss
Smiles the world’s all-loving Father.
Do the millions, his creation,
Know him and his works of love?
Seek him! In the heights above
Is his starry habitation!