To be free

[JunkYard]

What does it mean to be free? It's obvious to me that most people have locked themselves in self created prisons, so what does it mean to be free, and how do you get there?

and

For the Christians, What does it mean when Jesus said, "The truth shall make you free"?


What is truth, anyway?


Junk~

JunkYard Reviewed by JunkYard on 03-02-2007. To be free What does it mean to be free? It's obvious to me that most people have locked themselves in self created prisons, so what does it mean to be free, and how do you get there? and For the Christians, What does it mean when Jesus said, "The truth shall make you free"? What is truth, anyway? Rating: 5

[Xhoshi]

i actually dont believe the truth will set you free.
i believe people are not prepared to understand the "truth" of life.
knowledge a prison itself, which is why we are so carefree as children, unnassuming of the world, our playground. (ignorance is bliss)

i believe being one's self is freedom, not caring about what other's think of you. Self-consciousness is a great prison we are trapped by every day.

[Matt the Funk]

Good questions. You have to learn everything on your own. I believe I am free. I do what I want, I think what I want to think, I voice my opinion, I am not opressed. Once I am not free, I won't live.

[JunkYard]

I don't view knowledge to be a prison at all, but I understand your child analogy. I think children are more free because they are so innocent in that that are able to trust, and view life with such wonder. Ignorance can be bliss, but knowledge in and of itself is not a prison, imo. It's what you do with that knowledge, or how you handle it that matters.


Matt, Glad you chimed in, bro... Hows things going? I view things like you, man. (To a point) To live is freedom! What about the inward man, tho? Do you feel free in that regard?


Junk~

[40oz]

Freedom is thinking for yourself and doing what pleases you.

[delusionsofNORMALity]

freedom is an illusion.

if you ask that question of a thousand people, you'll most likely get a thousand answers. like truth or beauty, it is subjective. you can be free to do this or free to be that, but those are only specific instances of limited freedom. you are always limited by the desires of yourself and others, trapped by the needs of existence. absolute freedom from all the constraints of this life might be attained at death, but since i haven't died yet i'm not sure and i don't see that a corpse has much need of freedom anyway.

freedom might best be considered as a journey with no fixed destination besides its eventual end.

[JunkYard]

We are and will be as free as we allow ourselves to be. Did that make sense? It's all in the mind. :thumbsup:

[sharer6969]

Truth always liberates. Now, someone may say that this is not true for those "unprepared for it." However, that is only a manner of speaking - in reality those who are "unprepared" cannot receive the truth. What they hear and what they understand are two different things - they don't grasp the truth at all, but a corruption of it, a perversion created by their own character flaws. As such, these persons do not disprove the rule. As Christ said "you hear, but do not understand."

To an extent, I think people still aren't "hearing and understanding" Him, including those who profess explicit belief in Him.

[JunkYard]

"The truth shall make you free"

You're are a Christian, so what is truth to you?


Junk~

[sharer6969]

re. free will

The reason only Christians historically have REALLY believed in free will (though certainly not all of them have - ex. Calvinism), esp. if you go back to the early Greek language writings of the various "Church Fathers", was because they believed in creation ex nihilio.

This means, whatever exists besides God (whether that be Heaven, lesser spiritual planes, "angelic" beings, material existence, man, animals, rocks etc.) can be summed up as "created." Compared to God they are all the same, and He utterly different from them. And where as He simply "is" ("I Am, that I Am" like it says in the third chapter of Exodus), we "are" from "nothing." This is the meaning of the phrase that the "world rests in God's hand" - it's the idea that creation is being upheld by His "power" alone, that it has no existence besides this. God exists, creation has existence (from God.)

So, while that makes all things related to Him in the sense of an integral dependency, it also means they are all utterly unlike Him and in fact are NOT Him. That's the key, and that's where all pre-Christian, pre-Judaic "philosophies" and even mythologies went wrong - they imagined the substance of the Divine and the substance of the manifest universe to be identical. Hence, why ancient creation stories from other cultures (besides the Israelites) often began with the "birth of the Gods" from the same generic and eternal "stuff" which the universe is made of. In the Egyptian creation stories, you'll find the basic idea of the Gods emerging from an eternal abyss of dark waters. It is that chaotic abyss which is really "divine", and everything else is simply a form of it.

The God of the Jewish mythos, however, is different than creation. This is why, while Genesis chapter 1 uses the exact same themes as their pagan neighbours, there are some very obvious key differences, telling differences. The biggest, is that it is very clear that there was a point where the "chaotic abyss" (called "the waters" in Genesis) did not exist. God created them too, they exist because He "said so." And He in turn energized the abyss, and gave it form (the laws of nature.) The universe is like God's plant, growing and flowering, but rooted in the soils of absolute "nothingness".

I go through all of this detail, because this seperation means that the created order does have freedom. While it will do nothing that is a surprise to God (for He is outside of time - that is a "law of nature", itself a created thing), how it grows has a great deal of indepndence - yet in the end, it is still the plant which God has seeded and grown out. It's certainly a paradox, but not to the point of being an utterly pointless assertion.

So in reality, if the Christian is asked "do you believe in free will?" he must answer "yes." And when he is asked "do you believe in predestination" he will also say "yes." The created order is like God in that it has freedom, but it is unlike God in that it's freedom is circumscribed/limited. For example, you and I really only have "free choice" properly speaking, not "free will" - it's not as if we can just "will" whatever we may want at a given moment to happen. God does it constantly, we never do - save virtually perhaps (in the mind - though even that has severe limits). Reality imposes itself upon us, we can only make a relatively narrow set of choices about how we deal with that. So it's kind of like "micro free will" if there can even possibly be a comparison between this and the utter freedom of God (Who just "is".)