Freedom or slavery

As the purpose of this blog is not political, it is my intention to shy away from subjects merely political, and to focus on the purpose of human life, which for me and others means discipleship to Jesus Christ, and all that concerns it. Sometimes it's difficult to disentangle politics and religion, and this is especially true in the case of the movement called al-Islam, and so I have posted on the subject of al-Islam from time to time.

Long before it appeared in the U. S. Bill of Rights, freedom of speech was an ideal and a principle among many peoples, particularly the Greeks and the Jews, who each came at it from different directions, yet both arrived at the same place. Christianity is the heir to both Hellenism and Judaism, and so it's not surprising that the principle of free speech should have become enshrined in the U. S. constitution, whose authors were by and large men of Christian heritage.

What I want to say in this post is something very brief but still very important.

I would rather have the exercise of free speech for myself and every other human being, even at the risk of being slandered, mocked, lied to, seduced, tricked, and insulted, even at the risk of hearing the country I love vilified, the faith I espouse ridiculed, and the God I believe in blasphemed, than to let anyone or anything put a stop to it.

The new series of laws taking shape across the global village to limit the exercise of free speech will have the effect of killing it altogether. I think I am convinced that the exercise of free speech is the source of all other human liberties, of freedom itself, and that the curtailing of it is nothing less than the institution of slavery.

My favorite poet, Walt Whitman, the greatest American poet, put it very succinctly:

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth,
ever afterward resumes its liberty.

It is the "unquestioning obedience" which in my mind relates to the exercise of free speech.

Mankind's ancient enemy has not laid down and died, but like a lion is up and about, prowling through the world, looking for someone to devour. We know who he is, and we also can sense when he is at work in people and systems with which we have to do.

If the exercise of free speech is captured and subjected to regulation, forbidding people to tell the truth, allowing people to speak freely only when what they say is politically or religiously correct, then freedom is dead, and slavery reigns.

Here is an example of what I am talking about, though the link will take you to a blog which many will find deeply offensive, Infidel Bloggers Alliance, nonetheless it is something we must be aware of. The house of a near neighbor has caught fire in the night. Are we to go back to bed and slumber, thinking that the fire won't reach our own house? If your eyes are delicate, shield them from carnal profanity nearby and focus them on the post at issue, Geert Wilders To Be Charged For Making Anti-Islamic Statements.

Now that I've had my say on this issue, I will return to my usual preoccupation, to "keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near."