How Free Are You?
by
Robert H. Hamill

To think, to question, to criticize--this is the difference between a free world and a slave world.

The first morning of creation wrote what the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

Every new invention, every new achievement which brings freedom, brings also immense danger that it be misused.

The dangers of freedom have led to something worse--the suppression of freedom. Freedom has been rationalized, mostly by unofficial "volunteer" defenders of freedom. That is the paradox: freedom has been curtailed in the name of freedom!

1789 Edward Livingstone
...where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard.

The result of lack of education is not security, but ignorance and superstition. This is the cost of rationing freedom.

A man can be convicted, not for what he does, but for what he thinks.

We are engulfed in one more mad frenzy of fear which makes a mockery of freedom.

Controversy now appears to be a naughty thing. It has the feel of disobedience; it tastes like stolen pears, sweet but illegal. Controversy seems to come from the outside, or alien parents; it doesn't belong in the scene. To dispute or content for a viewpoint different from the prevailing one stirs up thought about unwelcome subject is a stranger among us. This is the present status of controversy, in the country that wrote controversy into its constitution and set up its law courts and legislatures on the theory that controversy is the heart and soul of justice. This country was born in controversy; it flourished on dissonance; it was nourished in debate.
Yet today controversy is abhorred like the plague. People burn books; they take magazines out of public libraries; they fire a school superintendent who has become a controversial figure.

Every man deserves the a right to work out his own divine destiny. No one can be trusted to define right behavior and true belief for other people. Therefore, lt controversy reign.

Truth is majestic and it must be preserved at all costs.

People will become accustomed to going through life with no regard for rules or sanctity.

The truth is too vast, to be fenced in even by our law, great as it is. There is no final and absolute truth, once and for all and completely written down. Everything is still subject to further illumination.

1951 Archibald MacLeish, the poet.
A man's freedom to believe...does not depend on what he believes. It does not depend on his being right' as other see the right, no matter how numerous they may be or how powerful. Right and wrong as others judge the right and wrong are irrelevant to the conception of freedom... the only option established...by the constitution is the option that a man is free to hold any opnion.

John Milton:
Let truth and Falsehood grapple: who ever knew Truth put to he worse in a free and open encounter?... Give me liberty to know, above all liberties." Yea, give that to society, and keep the country safe for all controversy, for without it society becomes a prison of silent fear and open terror.

The trouble with freedom is more serious than we imagine, and the remedy is more drastic than we desire. The trouble with freedom is basically not the denial of civil liberty primary, nor the smearing of men's reputations which...
filches from me my good name [and]
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

Freedom is not fought for on battlefield nor in political institutions; it is rooted in what the human spirit is able to do, not in what it is allowed to do. It is not conferred, but attained. It is earned as the realized capacity to choose whole heartily' what one honestly fells to be best. This freedom is a kind of self-mastery by which a man adjusts his own authentic rights to the pressures that are inescapable in society and nature. Such freedom is never bestowed upon man; it does not come natural to him; it must be achieved. He must decide himself, that is, to become what he truly meant to be--alive, responsible, decisive.

Freedom consists of nothing less than love--boundless, courageous, uncalculating love. Love is freedom from oneself; lover is perfect freedom. A truly free man is free because he loves' those men are in a state of freedom. Medieval scholar Hromadka (unknown)

A man decides to be free. No one can make him free.

The free is so committed that he risks everything without regrets or hesitation. He endures everything, even fire and prison and the chaplain's death. The struggle to be free never ends, even for the most committed.

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