http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/ just in case you guys haven't heard Chomsky has his own blog now with a comments section. play nice!!!

oj:

While I agree with your editorial comment, freedom also means that it's difficult to get consensus on what the "end" is.

If one is areligious, and believes that this existence is all that there ever will be, then quality of life is maximized by promoting freedom of choice in all areas, and it is thus an "end".

Wasn't there some philosopher who judged the chief end of democracy to be freedom, just as the chief end of oligrachy is wealth and the chief end of timocracy honor. What was his name?

Oh yes: I remember.

Socrates.

Michael:

Yes, they don't belong in a society that is religious and striving to be decent.

The reason that freedom came to be an "end" and not just a "means" is that too often the religious people couldn't agree to pursue their own ends and leave each other alone. Modernity didn't become secular for no reason. It got that way because a great many people became disillusioned about the "ends" and "means" pursued in the name of religion. It doesn't help your case to ignore that fact.

Brandon:

Who's ignoring it?

The violence assoiciated with the religious wars for differing ends was still preferable to the quiet death Europeans have chosen now.

Presuming the latter is true, one might get some difference of opinion as to whether sectarian slaughter is somehow preferable quiet death.

Yes, from secularists, like the Europeans. Better a murderer than a suicide.

Ah yes, "the only true freedom is slavery to Jesus Christ."

I have seen that announced as a sermon topic many, many times.

The Catholic Church has been the greatest enemy of freedom the world has seen.

You know the difference between being enslaved by a sanctimonious priest and being enslaved by an atheist?

There isn't one.

There's a huge one: the priest binds your conscience, allowing freedom to flourish; the atheist requires the state to bind you physically because you have no conscience. and freedom dies.

Absent a secular civic power, the priest binds you physically.

Anyhow, as far as I'm concerned, freedom is an end, not a means. You can even find something about that in the NT. "I was freeborn." (Acts 22:28)

Like most of the good ideas in the Bible, it didn't stick.

Stated in a slightly different way from Orrin: no one has to listen to the priest but everyone has to listen to the state. I voluntarily follow the priest (and of course, what he represents) but only wish I could voluntarily ignore the state.

Harry:

We are freeborn. But we can either submit to God or render a vile society.

"Better a murderer than a suicide."

Do you suppose God sees it that way?

Jeff:

He's killed millions but never Himself, so one would have to say yes.

John, you are correct that today, when the priest is constrained by the civilized parameters of secularism, you have an option (call it freedom) to follow the instructions of the priest or not.

Before secularism, you would not have had that option, and after the demise of secularism, you won't have it any more.

The American state today, at least, is far less instrusive than almost any religiously organized state ever has been. It also no longer lends much of its power to the church to restrain the behavior of unbelievers.

And since everybody is an unbeliever of somebody else's belief, that's a gain for freedom.

Religion is a form of mental slavery and, all too often, physical slavery as well.

If I preached a sermon on the topic, "the only true freedom is slavery to the ACLU," you would sneer.

Yet you don't sneer when a bigot covers the same shameful trick in a cloak of sanctimony.