Who's freer athiest or Catholic?

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How can there be a contest?Didn’t Jesus say"Come to Me and I will set you free"?Since athiests don’t come to Jesus they don’t know what freedom is.There like a mouse in a cage.They are free to move aroung in the cage but they can’t get outside of it.
 
“Freedom is something that only exists within the rules. It is only when you break the rules that you become bound by the consequences.”

-Chesterton
 
Simply stated:
Atheists are freer from obedience, care, and purpose.
Catholics are freer from stress, unhappiness, and fatigue.
 
tafan said:
All good answers, I will give a slightly different spin towards the same result.

Not meaning to pick on GloriousOrder and her excellant post, I could have picked from several to make my point, but her’s is the most directly associated with my view.

No doubt, freedom is misunderstood in our modern world. And those answers about understanding the true meaning of freedom are the best as far as being good for us Catholics. But convincing to others, not really. So I would disagree with GloriousOrder, not in her ultimate conclusion, but just in the point she made in these two sentences. The athesits is not freer given the atheist idea of freedom (or the modern, common idea) because they have less inhibitions. Not at all.

There is absolutely no choice of moral behavior a atheist can make that we cannot make. No one can argue this. An atheist can commit abortion, we can commit abortion; an atheist can kill, we can kill. So at the most basic level, our freedom is at least equal. However, we have more information then the athesit. We know that pornagraphy is wrong, he may not know this.

Now, part of freedom is understanding results of any action, good or bad. One is more free when one can better understand the results. The blind man in an unknown room is not as free to walk across the room filled with furniture as I am. We are both capable of doing so, but the results for me will be to successfully make it to the other side. The same result can be obtained by the blind man, but only with brusied shins, and after a fall or two. Who is more free to decide, me or the blind man?

So since we know the results of our moral choinces, and the atheist does not. We are certainly more free, even when we ignore our “inhibitions”. In no way, from any perspective, can a athest be considered more free than us.
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excellent post.I agree.
 
valentino said:
How is a Cathiolic more free than an athiest?
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As a Catholic all I have to say is…

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and of death.”- Romans 8:2

That answers your question

God bless :byzsoc:

David
 
JoArtist said:
No such thing as total freedom our actions are always at least partially dictated by God, society, philosophy, ect… it really is just about who’s rules you are following (or trying to follow). I would much rather follow the rules of a loving God than a messed up societies… but that is just me.
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But just suppose we were to able to surrender to God completely and our will became His will.In other words God lives completely in us.i believe some saints have been so united with God that their actions become God’s actions.Now we know that God is totally free.And even though those saints are in a sense doing God’s actions.they are totallly free because God is totally free.They don’t have to choose right or wrong it is just the normal thing to do right.
 
One idea of freedom is having internal consistency. Viewed that way the atheist is not necessarily less free than a Catholic. If a Catholic is wildly inconsistent in how they live then they would lack freedom. One can imagine how someone who is full of lies, within and without, would not be very free.
Ridgerunner said:
The human ego is the worst slavemaster a person can possibly have.

I recall something A.Solzhenitsyn said. I’ll have to paraphrase it and give the context. He talked about what was probably the worst part of the Gulag; the gold mines of the Kolyma, where the temperature regularly fell below -40 and prisoners were driven out into it, dressed in sacks, to dig flecks of gold out of the iron-hard frozen earth with crowbars and given 10 oz of watery, adulterated bread to eat, along with an utterly repulsive and non-nutritious “soup” made entirely of pine needles to ward off scurvy.

Anyway, (and paraphrasing) he concluded his description of it by saying: One cannot be truly free until it is a matter of indifference to him whether he is, or is not, in the Kolyma.

And he actually knew of people who accomplished that. They were purged clean of their egoism and, to Solzhenitsyn, could then think as clearly and purely as if a bright light suddenly turned on in their heads.

Jesus said His yoke is sweet, His burden light. By that, He did not mean a faithful person could not find things hard, even hard in following His commandments. By it, to my understanding, He meant that abandoning oneself to God’s will, one is freed of the heavy burden of one’s own ego.

I, myself am a sinner, and have all the faults of the egoism with which we are all afflicted. But I have noticed in life that those I have known who are the most abandoned to God’s Providence; to His will, have a measure of freedom that others, less abandoned to it, do not have. They have, most certainly, a degree of freedom from care that most of us do not have.
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I’m reminded of: ‘For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.’ I think in Christ’s saying and the story you recount the best understanding of freedom is given. Those who cling to anything too strongly are not free.
 
[bibledrb]John 8:31-47[/bibledrb]

We can only be free in Christ; therefore, whoever is not in Christ is a slave to sin.
 
valentino said:
How is a Catholic more free than an athiest?
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I actually reckon there’s theoretically no freedom to life on earth lived as a Catholic at all, in that acknowledging God means recognising the need for total submission, rather than freedom.

Even if no one ever acknowledged God and so lived a life of apparent freedom, deviation and sin, willingly or unwillingly, the result would be Hell. When the grand scheme is ultimately experienced outside of time, or if death is followed by an eternity, the period in which these people think they have freedom is infinitely minute so as to be unimportant.

So no one is free.
 
James

I actually reckon there’s theoretically no freedom to life on earth lived as a Catholic at all, in that acknowledging God means recognising the need for total submission, rather than freedom.

Clearly submission is a freely chosen act, without which there could be no submission.

It is the atheist who is driven by a compulsive need to rebel who has lost the freedom to submit.
 
James1215 said:
I actually reckon there’s theoretically no freedom to life on earth lived as a Catholic at all, in that acknowledging God means recognising the need for total submission, rather than freedom.

Even if no one ever acknowledged God and so lived a life of apparent freedom, deviation and sin, willingly or unwillingly, the result would be Hell. When the grand scheme is ultimately experienced outside of time, or if death is followed by an eternity, the period in which these people think they have freedom is infinitely minute so as to be unimportant.

So no one is free.
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I don’t think submission is a loss of freedom.Man’s freedom is lost because he is a slave to sin.From our early childhood we are slaves of the flesh.Submission to God’s will sets us free from slavery to the flesh(of course its not immediate and I suppose we work on it till we die)and that entails more than just overeating or the slavery to sex.We are slaves to our selfishness.To be free from ourselves we are able to live moral lives.Mother Theresa was very submissive Im sure to God’s will but she appeared to be totally free in her actions to love the poor.
 
The thing is that submission is not a choice when the alternative is Hell, if one believes.

The other thing is that the definition of deviation reinforces this lack of an alternative: sin. Deviating is everything that is bad, hurts, is loathsome etc. To be free, we would need many options to take in life, not just 1. That’s my view!
 
valentino said:
I don’t think submission is a loss of freedom.Man’s freedom is lost because he is a slave to sin.From our early childhood we are slaves of the flesh.Submission to God’s will sets us free from slavery to the flesh(of course its not immediate and I suppose we work on it till we die)and that entails more than just overeating or the slavery to sex.We are slaves to our selfishness.To be free from ourselves we are able to live moral lives.Mother Theresa was very submissive Im sure to God’s will but she appeared to be totally free in her actions to love the poor.
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So essentially it’s just a choice of submissions? Being a slave of the flesh seems to me to be a matter of attitude. One can go along being led by momentary impulses, or one can exercise discernment between one impulse and another. Avoiding the slavery of selfishness is a matter of realising how one is connected to others and to the wider world. Constantly looking inwards and wondering whether one is measuring up seems guaranteed to promote selfishness. Oh, and if I recall correctly what I’ve read of Mother Theresa, she resolved her crisis of faith by approaching her God through suffering - even if her profoundly ill patients did not consent to her projected masochism…
 
James1215 said:
The thing is that submission is not a choice when the alternative is Hell, if one believes.
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Sair said:
So essentially it’s just a choice of submissions?
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This reminds me of the NonStampCollector YouTube video Titled: Free Will - “God Style” PART 2.

(for various reasons I didn’t want to post a direct link. a partial dialog is below. ).

It’s starts off with a citizen that didn’t pay his taxes getting a visit from some one from the tax collector informing him he has done wrong in not paying taxes and the punishment for not paying is time in prison. But the tax office has just implemented a new “free will” policy. So he has free will whether or not to pay. If he doesn’t pay he will still go to prison. The citizen had a hard time understanding how that was still considered free will.

Citizen:It’s not a free choice really is it? You just admitted that you are going to send me to prison if I don’t pay my taxes.

Tax Employee:The word free only implies you are capable of choosing and nothing else. fair and unfair is not the issue because you are still free to choose.Personally speaking I choose to pay my taxes. I don’t want to go to prison so I choose to follow the tax office’s commandments. Having no free will means you are an inanimate object, like a robot or a table or a rock or a chair or something. In other words you are incapable of choosing. You’re not saying you’d rather be a robot or a chair arn’t you.

Citizen:Well why don’t you say it’s the law to play tax. Why don’t you say it’s compulsory. You’re just playing word games saying I have the free will to choose but if I don’t choose the way you want me to you are going to penalize me by throwing me in prison. It’s not a fair choice is it.

Tax Employee:Hmmm…It sounds like you are arguing that you don’t have a choice because you are under duress. But you do have a choice because you are not under duress to pay taxes. Disobeying the tax laws is pleasurable, I know. Because you get to keep the money for yourself and the tax office’s punishment is not immediate.

Citizen:Yeah, but at the same time you are saying I have free will to pay taxes or not but one of those choices is going to lead to you punishing me for having made that choice. How is that different to a law. Why don’t you call that compulsory.

Tax Employee:Because it’s not compulsory. The tax office doesn’t want mindless robots just paying taxes, paying taxes, paying taxes. We want you to pay taxes because you want to and you choose to. We have more respect for people than that. Just making them pay with no choice? The tax office free will policy is loving. As you already know failure to pay taxes leads to a prison sentence…

Citizen:Yeah, that’s what I’m saying!

Tax Employee:…Let me finish. If you choose to pay taxes you will be relieved of your prison sentence and allowed to remain free. The system is based on positive reenforcement, not punishment. Do good and be rewarded or do bad and nothing happens that wasn’t going to happen any way.

Citizen:Well…okay…yeah, I get what you mean. It’s not really punishment then is it…What do you think I should do?

Tax Employee:Well, you better pay don’t you think. If you don’t I’ll call the cops.

Citizen: How long is the prison sentence?

Tax Employee:Forever. Until you die. And there are guys in there who will punch the out of you every day.

Citizen:Hmmm…well given that choice…and thank you for giving me that choice. I appreciate you not trying to force it on me…I think I’ll…well, it’s actually not as easy as it looks. Can I have a few days to make up my mind?

Tax Employee:Of course. Take as long as you want. But, I might call the cops at any time. And when they arrive it’s too late and it’s prison for the rest of your life.

Citizen:Okay, I understand. Thank you for revealing this for me. It’s so kind of you to give me this good news.
 
Atheists definitely have more freedom. Of course, you can define freedom in such a way that they don’t, but an atheist probably will not feel compelled to accept your definition. He’s got that freedom.
 
Perplexity

Atheists definitely have more freedom. Of course, you can define freedom in such a way that they don’t, but an atheist probably will not feel compelled to accept your definition. He’s got that freedom.

Not if the atheists are slaves to their passions. 😉
 
James

**The other thing is that the definition of deviation reinforces this lack of an alternative: sin. Deviating is everything that is bad, hurts, is loathsome etc. To be free, we would need many options to take in life, not just 1. That’s my view! **

Your view is that the atheist defines what is good and what is bad. That is not freedom. That is slavery to one’s own whims.
**
The thing is that submission is not a choice when the alternative is Hell, if one believes.**

There is nothing wrong with submission to avoid hell. That is not a loss of freedom. That is a net gain of eternal life with God.

The person who submits to the civil law (pays his taxes, obey traffic laws, behaves peaceably, etc.) does so in part because he fears prison (hell on earth). You don’t say he has lost his freedom because he chooses to submit to the laws of the land, do you? Then why would he lose his freedom by submitting to the laws of God?

This from Lord Acton:

“And I should have wished to show you that the same deliberate rejection of the moral code which smoothed the paths of absolute monarchy and of oligarchy, signalized the advent of the democratic claim to unlimited power,—that one of its leading champions avowed the design of corrupting the moral sense of men, in order to destroy the influence of religion, and a famous apostle of enlightenment and toleration wished that the last king might be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

In other words, if you can destroy religion, you can make everyone equal … equally free to be amoral … or immoral … as they may choose.
 
Whether or not I claim what is sin is good, it is wrong – no atheist re-writing of morality matters here (hypothetically). If you know something is bad, you have no choice but to submit to the good. If you don’t know, you might think you have choices, but ultimately your ‘freedom’ achieves only Hell.

Would you consider it freedom if someone said: “Ok, you can murder this guy if you want. Or just hurt him, it’s up to you.” That’s an appalling offer! Freedom is the choice between good things, not between something you have to submit to doing and something you’re compelled not to do.

As to the comparison with lawful society, this is disanalogous. Law can be justified by saying we submit to total rule (one legal system) so as to be able to conduct our own affairs as suits our interests free from the predation of other citizens. Freedom is the ability of an actor to do something uninhibited by the actions of another. There are 3 things involved. With a theological view of the world, there are only two: us and God, with or against. There is nothing we can do but submit our interests to God’s so that we have no independent interests. In doing so, we lose the possibility of freedom. It may be totally good, but it is not free. That’s my bugbear with the Christian view of free will, because it’s absorbed by morality and is only a function of good/bad, not a feature of human capacity.
 
James

**Freedom is the ability of an actor to do something uninhibited by the actions of another. **

Not really.

“Freedom is the ability of an actor to **CHOOSE TO **do something uninhibited by the actions of another.”

You are free to choose to commit murder with the consequence that prison awaits you.

You are free to choose to commit sins with the consequence that hell awaits you.

The fear of prison keeps many people on the straight and narrow.

The fear of hell keeps many people on the straight and narrow.

Fear of the consequences of wrong-doing is eminently reasonable. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool.

In either case the punishment should fit the crime. Your freedom is not taken away from you in either case because you can always rebel against human law or against God’s law.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Fear of the consequences of wrong-doing is eminently reasonable. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool. [Yes, *precisely
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In either case the punishment should fit the crime. Your freedom is not taken away from you in either case because you can always rebel against human law or against God’s law.

Can you?

Firstly, no. No one can rebel against God’s law because the consequences are absolute.

Secondly, the testimony of someone who says they have free will is worth nothing.

Even under the conditions of life on earth, examples of choice do not equate to freedom. A man - guilty or innocent - can choose to say anything under questioning, but under torturous interrogation, do you think he has any freedom when he ‘chooses’ to ‘confess’?

The comparison is that we can only submit or die. When people are faced with eternal Heaven or eternal Hell, when any and every action is categorised correspondingly ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and when the arbiter is an omnipotent God, there is no sane way to believe we have free will except if free will is a term signifying self-control (sticking to what we know). To put it less morbidly, if good is absolute and objective, and God existent and apparent, maintaining that we have free will is a theological violation because it pretends that we have a choice to make. How could anyone be so arrogant as to believe they have a choice to make in the face of all that is good? A fool, indeed.
 
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