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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. The Two Freedoms What the president forgets By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 800 words Publication date: August 21, 2005 The other day, following yet more deaths of Iraqis and Americans, I began wondering what exactly is this freedom that, according to George W Bush, they are dying for. The White House website offers page after page of the expected rhetoric – “We're advancing freedom in the broader Middle East” – but no definitions of freedom. Using the internal search engine, the closest I could get was a 2002 speech by the president to the Iowa Republican Party where he claimed that fighting terror was “a chance to define freedom for future generations”. But not to define it today... I wasn’t surprised. Freedom is one of those vague words, like “love” and “intelligence” that everyone interprets in their own way, with the inevitable potential for misunderstanding. I suspect that 43 has not thought much about freedom. When the word pops into his head it probably comes with a grab-bag of images, such as multi-party elections, uncensored speech and – of course – freedom of religion. All set against a background of picket fences, or an ethnic equivalent, in communities untroubled by terrorism. I have no complaint with any of that, as long as children are protected from religious indoctrination. My problem is that this picture of freedom does not go far enough. Any definition of freedom must recognize that there are at least two types – freedom from and freedom to. The first is freedom from harmful situations and events, which, in addition to political repression, include poverty, illness, violence, prejudice and ignorance. I doubt that Bush and his ilk would deny the importance of these. They could even point to efforts that the administration has made to increase such freedoms at home and abroad. The problem is that in the president’s world some freedoms are prioritized over others. In Iraq, Bush trumpets freedom from Saddam Hussein more than freedom from violence and multi-party elections more than freedom from the discomfort and disease that arise from erratic electricity supplies and malfunctioning sewage systems. That is not a minor complaint. We do not vote every day and even in Baghdad most people are unscathed. But freedom to determine the course of our lives is severely constrained if we have no light to see by or if we are surrounded by the stink of excrement. Back in the United States, the 36 million Americans who live below the poverty line would like freedom from hunger and hardship – but the president’s tax and social security policies will not help them. Freedom from ignorance? Not when 55 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form. We can console ourselves that American children can read a little better than the world average. On the other hand, they score considerably below average on mathematical literacy. Don’t we expect more from the world’s richest nation? Freedom from violence? As I’ve written before, Americans are 33 times more likely than Brits to be killed by a firearm. Freedom from prejudice? It’s difficult to measure, but walk down any street in the mid-West and you can probably count the number of mixed-race relationships on a single thumb. Freedom from illness? Restricted by bans on stem-cell research. How about freedom to? It’s a little more complex. Ideally, freedom to extends from the mundane – the freedom to sleep naked or to have one’s favorite cereal at breakfast – through the ideal – the freedom to find a cure for AIDS or create the perfect cappuccino – to the impossible – the freedom to walk to Mars or live forever. Setting aside the impossible theoretically leaves us with the freedom to harm others – and others’ freedom to harm us. (There lies the crux of much debate – compare the freedom to drive while drunk with the freedom from death under the wheels of an inebriated driver.) Yet the reality is that even when denied the freedom to harm others, most Americans can celebrate a cornucopia of freedoms from the cradle to the grave. Most, that is. Without freedom from, there is no freedom to. A hungry woman is not free to choose a career in life. And a child disabled by a stray gunshot wound has lost the freedom to become a football player or ballet dancer. The rest of us are luckier. Even those millions of Americans who are free from poverty, ignorance, violence and so on are not always free to pursue happiness in their own way. Marry a same-sex partner? Smoke marijuana or take ecstasy? Sell sex? A few of the freedoms denied in the Land of the Free. George Bush will never champion these freedoms. The President is imprisoned by faith, which for centuries has denied men and women freedom of mind and body. As long as religion holds sway in America, its people will never be as free as they think they are. Whenever possible Martin Foreman responds to intelligent questions on aspects of atheism. Send an e-mail. Print publications wishing to syndicate the column should click here. Individual subscribers wishing to read the column should click here specifying date, number or title of column.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |