Freedom or Slavery?

There was a very learned man once, named Edmund Burke, who shortly after our nation was born, stated that freedom without virtue was not freedom but license to pursue whatever passions prevailed in the intemperate mind; that man's right to freedom was in exact proportion to his will to place moral chains upon his own appetite; that the less restraint shown within the more restraint must be imposed from without.

In those few short words, Edmund Burke defined the difference between a free society such as was established by our Founding Fathers and a slave society in which man’s every move is subjugate to the government.

Our Founding Fathers established the United States on biblical law, on the bible — from the individual to the nation and all levels in-between, the bible establishes a civil government based on self-government (self-discipline) and virtue (right and wrong). Our Founding Fathers knew that this was the only means by which an individual could know personal freedom, while at the same time contributing to the freedom of the society as a whole.

Freedom is eroded when people fail to follow the dictates of self-government and virtue, instead pursuing the passions that prevail in the intemperate and decadent mind, requiring the imposition of more and more outside control in an attempt to maintain a civilized society, resulting in an increasing lose of freedom for all people.

In today's society, "freedom" is defined as being free from moral standards and self-discipline — "if it feels good, do it"; instead of freedom being the result of a civilized and moral society in which each individual, through self-government and virtue, contributes to the order and civility of the larger society that voluntarily adheres to a moral standard. The decent of the United States into moral decadence is destroying what our Founding Fathers built, and in so doing, giving the United States over to tyranny.

We can stop it. The price of freedom is vigilance, and vigilance is long overdue.

Lynn M Stuter

Education Researcher

Washington State

©September 1999

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