Freedom and God

Freedom has been considered to be one of the main characteristics of the essence of God. As man is created in the image of God and freedom is considered to be God's essential trait, therefore it has been presumed that freedom intrinsically is man's most innate, transcendental quality as well. If God is free, and man is created in God's image, then man, all human beings, are free or potentially can become free if they conform to the image of God. Freedom has become one of the most often mentioned issues of the modern religious discourse, moralizing with regard to our choosing what is good and opposing what is evil, taking the side of the  right and forsaking the wrong. Based upon the premise that God is absolutely free, this discourse sites man's freedom to act morally and ethically and his, or her, being responsible for the actions taken and therefore liable to punishment for not acting morally. Determinism is rejected upon the premise that if man is not free to chose what to do, right or wrong, good or evil, then he would not be subject to criticism for his actions, let alone judgement for his crimes and misdeeds. The whole idea of sin becomes redundant if the idea of intrinsic freedom is discarded, because sin is traditionally regarded as a misdeed, consciously and willingly performed by a person and therefore either a crime, if performed knowingly, or a mistake, if it was made unknowingly. In the former case, it is punished more severely, as a retribution for personal insistence in sin, as an acknowledged wrongdoing; whereas in the latter, when performed as a mistake, it is to be punished less severely.

Freedom therefore has become so widely  acknowledged as a real thing, first as a reference to God's essential quality and later on as a humanist idea of human's natural rights. It goes without saying in today's politicized dialogue between the secular and religious people that freedom is something real and empirically tangible, both as a religious concept and as a secular idea in relation to democratic principles.

Unfortunately, both parties are terribly wrong in this regard. Political freedoms are good to be proclaimed during an electoral campaign as a promise to free people from certain political, social, economic or cultural constrains, placed on certain individuals as a result of human social relationships' development taking a particular twist. Such freedoms, as well as constrains, are relative in that some people have more instances, constraining or determining their actions in one field or area of life and less in another, and some people have other instances, constraining them in their actions. The absence of these constrains is viewed as freedom from those particular instances in certain areas of life, but most often such relative freedoms are obtained at a cost, usually at the expense of the absence of similar constrains or limitations in other areas or spheres of our activity. Therefore, such freedoms should be looked upon not as an acquirement, whether factual or prospective,  of a certain degree of freedom as it is, but rather as a substitute of one set of constrains to another, most probably with the resultant overall amount of "freedom" being the same in the end as it was in the beginning but felt differently and perceived as a greater freedom mostly due to the novelty of the feeling.

 Freedom, philosophically speaking, is a culture-related universal category which denotes the capacity of a subject to act and behave in the absence of external goal setting. As long as the subject acts within a certain cultural environment, the latter is going to produce certain pressure upon the subject and set the parameters of the mentioned subject's development, behavior, and actions. Such parameters will determine the set of forming constrains and eventually the character and the personal qualities of the subject. In absolute terms, there is no such thing as freedom. There is a set of external factors that set the goals of the subject's personal development and his personal characteristics, and eventually his actions and behavior.

Since there is no way anybody can ever be absolutely free, as long as they are acting within a certain cultural environment people feel better when the overall amount of external goal-setting constrains and the quality of the constrains are such that it does not make them feel miserable now, at least not more miserable than they had felt before.

 This kind of approach to the idea of freedom is characteristic of the secular environment where the threat or possibility of a greater number of constraining factors is viewed as a sufficient stimulus to encourage people to act according to rules accepted in a given society. In religious environment, the idea of freedom is looked upon as an opportunity of an individual to be free regardless of present social or cultural constrains. Choosing to follow certain rules is not tied to the danger of less social freedom. Nor is it conditioned by the greater social or cultural freedoms, as a reward for compliance. But, as long as an individual does what is considered good and right from religious point of view, he or she is free by definition, regardless of how the set of external goal-setting constrains changes in the process. In this case, freedom is looked upon as the freedom from sin and from sinful nature, determining the instances of those constrains in that particular individual's life.

Freedom from sin, and from the power of the fallen carnal human nature is in the individual's ability to choose what is right and good. It is generally believed  that that choice is made because of the intrinsic transcendental freedom, given to man along with the "spirit" of life at the moment of his creation by God. Unfortunately, the concept of choosing, in absolute terms, does not refer to human beings, but to God alone. With regard to man, the idea of choosing anything at all, especially when it comes to issues of good versus evil and life versus death, is far from being an intrinsic characteristic, though. God is the one who does the choosing. With man it is a figurative expression, denoting the state of affairs rather than literally meaning a universally thoroughly weighted choice on his part. As soon as a choice is made by man, most often it ends up being a certain form of heresy. Heresy is choice, etymologically. And human choice is false by the very fact of its being a choice, and even more so if it is viewed as a free one.

The very precept of being free to choose is fallacious, because freedom in absolute terms is an illusion, and any choice thus claimed in the name of it is a lie. Since religion today derives its concept of freedom from the Biblical account of God, the only way to prove that that concept is wrong is by proving that the divine qualities and characteristics, presented in the Scriptures, absolutely have nothing to do with the philosophical notion of freedom.