At what point is a people too stupid to be free?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pugsly
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
P

Pugsly

Guest
Jesus said “The truth will set you free”

America was founded as a free nation…with the founders warning us that we needed to use our religious values to self-police our freedom. I’ve long suspected that there is a relationship between knowing reality and being free. My main question is philosophical in nature…What is the relationship of knowing truth to being a free agent?

and ofcourse…the question…

Is America too stupid to be free?
 
For example…there’s a saying…“Knowledge is power”

As we get less knowledgable…we become weak…and weakness leads to our being manipulated…less free.
 
Those who walk in darkness are unaware of the enemy. Those who walk in the light can see the enemy sneaking around.

Case in point, not many people understand how to discern political language. When the elites discuss “quality of life” rather than quantity, it is implied that some lives are inferior. When they discuss population control and material prosperity, they are appealing to our greed for comfortable lives to devalue the poor. People cease to be free when they are silly enough to reject God and His commandments.
 
Here are a few verses from Ephesians which answer this to some degree.
Paul is warning the people of God to beware of apostasy and describes one way which leads to it.

Ephesians 4:17 “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”

People outside of the church are naturally “stupid” to the things of God. And they naturally follow a course which leads to further “stupidity.”

America started with God-fearing colonists and an impressive influence of the Word of God. However, since then, have, for several reasons, followed the road to apostasy. And over just a few generations, are characterized by profound ingnorance and hardness of heart. This is why so many Americans today have never heard basic biblical concepts, and live like brutes.

This nation is more like the cities of Sodom and Gomorra.

This is telling it from our vantage point and deals with our contribution to the problem. From God’s vantage point, He is judging us by withdrawing His sanctifying influences on our nation. (Read Romans 1:19-ff. Notice the repeated phrase, “God gave them over”)
It was a tremendous mercy of Him upon this land to bring the Pilgrims to it, but now we are reaping the fruits of our waywardness and failure to heed the their message.
 
Pugsly said:
Jesus said “The truth will set you free”

America was founded as a free nation…with the founders warning us that we needed to use our religious values to self-police our freedom. I’ve long suspected that there is a relationship between knowing reality and being free. My main question is philosophical in nature…What is the relationship of knowing truth to being a free agent?

and ofcourse…the question…

Is America too stupid to be free?
Click to expand...
You know who’s too stupid to be free? Those who LIMIT what they can do with their lives through doctrine and superstition. I’m sure there’s a LOT of things you’d like to do but stopped yourself from doing just because you’ve been TOLD it’s wrong. When others impose their beliefs on you like that and you just take it and follow it blindly, tell me, are you really free?
 
thebartender said:
You know who’s too stupid to be free? Those who LIMIT what they can do with their lives through doctrine and superstition. I’m sure there’s a LOT of things you’d like to do but stopped yourself from doing just because you’ve been TOLD it’s wrong. When others impose their beliefs on you like that and you just take it and follow it blindly, tell me, are you really free?
Click to expand...
Hmmmm, you seem to be a bartender. Have you any customers who are addicted to alcohol? Are they free?

No. Alcohol has wrapped chains around them and they are not free. Some people drink themselves into utter destitution.

In the same way, people get wrapped up in other things: shopping (materialism), sex, work… all because they lack prudential balance in their lives.

The Church tells me not to drink *to excess, *not to engage in sex *outside of marriage, *not to be so focused on one or two aspects of this world *to the exclusion of other things. *The Church shows me how to elevate myself above those traps which can ensnare me and make me un-free.

You seem to think that “someone” telling people not to do something limits their freedom, but in reality, the Church shows us how to be more free, how to be more human, how to be better selves.

If you saw a blind man about to step into an open manhole, wouldn’t you tell him not to step there? Would that make him less free or more free?

Welcome to CAF 🙂 I am sure you will have many lively debates with people here 🙂
 
thebartender said:
You know who’s too stupid to be free? Those who LIMIT what they can do with their lives through doctrine and superstition. I’m sure there’s a LOT of things you’d like to do but stopped yourself from doing just because you’ve been TOLD it’s wrong. When others impose their beliefs on you like that and you just take it and follow it blindly, tell me, are you really free?
Click to expand...
Yes, so please don’t force yours on me.
God bless you
 
thebartender said:
You know who’s too stupid to be free? Those who LIMIT what they can do with their lives through doctrine and superstition. I’m sure there’s a LOT of things you’d like to do but stopped yourself from doing just because you’ve been TOLD it’s wrong. When others impose their beliefs on you like that and you just take it and follow it blindly, tell me, are you really free?
Click to expand...
So you consider yourself free because you can do anything whenever you want and however you want. Fair enough, that’s how most of the world defines it. However there are such things as consequences. So if I eat as much as I want, whatever I want, I shouldn’t be surprised if I am fat and/or unhealthy. So I stopped myself from eating whatever I want and whenever I want and I went out and forced myself to exercise because observing the doctrine of healthy eating and exercise leads to good health. Is that stupid? Tell me who is really free?

Another one would be promiscuous sex. You open up yourself to STDs. Now you can say why limit myself? I can also wear a condom. Well, unprotected sex is like playing Russian roulette with a 5 bullets but sex with a condom takes away 2 bullets and leaves you 3. Now if you abstained from premarital sex and married someone who also abstained from premarital sex and you both remained faithful to each other, then you don’t have to worry about STDs at all.

Freedom is not doing whatever you want. Freedom is an invitation to responsibility. This is why adults are accorded more freedoms than children. Ideally an adult should have more of a sense of responsibility than a child. Now if adults viewed freedom not as invitation to responsibility but as an invitation to indulge oneself, than you will be stuck with more and more laws as the government steps in to do what people cannot do, which is govern themselves. This is the irony, the more people indulge in the false concept of freedom, the more they find themselves hemmed in by a lot of government laws and regulations.
 
Unfortunately, education today is mostly left wing propaganda. Even inside the Church this liberalism has infected many of our clergy and theologians and laity.

Thomas Jefferson bemoaned the likelihood that a poorly educated citizenry could be worse that an uneducated citizenry. At least the uneducated have not had their common sense drilled out of them by pompous left wing zealots. 😉
 
Indeed, atheism brings a flawed logic;atheist people are having logical fallacies, the one who says it but also the one who hears it doesn’t observe it. Or doesnt want to.
Example: Neil Tyson presentation about intelligent design, on youtube
Ther is this guy with a doctorate in front of many other guys with doctorates (including Dawkins)
He tries to push the ideea of the “God of gaps” He talks about Newton as the greatest scientist on Earth and gives this example about gravity;how newton was able to calculate the trajectory vor every planets with its moon related to sun, and Newton couldnt write the equations for the whole solar system; Here cites Newton, who was wondering about such complexity, Newton stating very clear that in his opinion such complexity couldnt arive by chance; Tyler twist saying something like “you see, Newton didn’t mention God talking about 2 planets because he could write the equations (wrong, it was a pure sientific paper, meaningless to mention God), but mention it about the system where he couldn’t write the equations (wrong, the observation is philosophical and not scientifical). He does the same with other famous scientist and suggests something like Newton and others didn’t write more science in their life, (and so any other creationist scientist) and stopped research because their belief (???), “like God make it, is too complicated for me”
Newton never said something like this, never said that nobody will never do more than he did.
Then somehow he draws the conclusion that any unproductive scientist who believes in God, is unproductive because of his belief (acusing them of the ideea " nobody can do more but God”)
He suggest that an unproductive atheist is good, if an atheist scientist can’t make it then indeed cant be made for now, but an unproductive believer is a cheat, because anyway he belives(???) it can’t be made.
He gave an example how religion is bad, some muslim imam who turned everybody against scientists in the muslim world, and they had a very unproductive time.
But later on he is wondering how there can be believers scientist in the academy? He strongly suggest to purge them out because obviously they are unproductive; basically to do the same thing as the muslim imam but from an atheistic position.
This is atheistic logic.
 
A little more related to my previous post:
Tyson tried to criticise the IE suggesting God made mistakes in his design saying “there is no engineer who put the entertainment system in the middle of the sewage system”
Maybe thats because he has entertainment with the sewage system…:rotfl:
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Unfortunately, education today is mostly left wing propaganda. Even inside the Church this liberalism has infected many of our clergy and theologians and laity.

Thomas Jefferson bemoaned the likelihood that a poorly educated citizenry could be worse that an uneducated citizenry. At least the uneducated have not had their common sense drilled out of them by pompous left wing zealots. 😉
Click to expand...
I sadly agree
 
cap76 said:
Here are a few verses from Ephesians which answer this to some degree.
Paul is warning the people of God to beware of apostasy and describes one way which leads to it.

Ephesians 4:17 “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”

People outside of the church are naturally “stupid” to the things of God. And they naturally follow a course which leads to further “stupidity.”

America started with God-fearing colonists and an impressive influence of the Word of God. However, since then, have, for several reasons, followed the road to apostasy. And over just a few generations, are characterized by profound ingnorance and hardness of heart. This is why so many Americans today have never heard basic biblical concepts, and live like brutes.

This nation is more like the cities of Sodom and Gomorra.

This is telling it from our vantage point and deals with our contribution to the problem. From God’s vantage point, He is judging us by withdrawing His sanctifying influences on our nation. (Read Romans 1:19-ff. Notice the repeated phrase, “God gave them over”)
It was a tremendous mercy of Him upon this land to bring the Pilgrims to it, but now we are reaping the fruits of our waywardness and failure to heed the their message.
Click to expand...
Thank you for a wonderful insight with Biblical verses to back it all up.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Unfortunately, education today is mostly left wing propaganda. Even inside the Church this liberalism has infected many of our clergy and theologians and laity.

Thomas Jefferson bemoaned the likelihood that a poorly educated citizenry could be worse that an uneducated citizenry. At least the uneducated have not had their common sense drilled out of them by pompous left wing zealots. 😉
Click to expand...
With a bow to W.F. Buckley for plagiarizing him, I would rather be governed by the first 100 hillbillies I met after crossing the county line into Taney County, Mo, (where Branson is) than by the top 100 tenured professors at Harvard. There is a strong likelihood the former would have acquired common sense and kept it, due to being obliged to live in the real world. There is also a high likelihood that the latter would have had any inborn good sense drained from them by their training and by their provincialism.

I’m not so sure it’s so much a matter of being poorly educated as it is a matter of being wrongly educated.
 
Ridgerunner

**I’m not so sure it’s so much a matter of being poorly educated as it is a matter of being wrongly educated. **

To be wrongly educated is to be poorly educated! 👍
 
Pugsly said:
Sorry…just a high school grad…turned shipyard worker. But I reckon I likes to think too:).
Click to expand...
Actually, I think you used proper grammar. So apparently, I am too stupid to be free. LOL.
 
Pugsly said:
Jesus said “The truth will set you free”

America was founded as a free nation…with the founders warning us that we needed to use our religious values to self-police our freedom. I’ve long suspected that there is a relationship between knowing reality and being free. My main question is philosophical in nature…What is the relationship of knowing truth to being a free agent?

and ofcourse…the question…

Is America too stupid to be free?
Click to expand...
There is no relationship between knowing truth and being a free agent. We are all made in the Image of God and thus all blessed with Free Will. Yes free will can be damaged or weakened by our misuse of it, but it does not lessen nor destroy the dignity of freedom that we have. No one is too stupid to be free.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top