And yes? What about our freedom?

[ladyinred]

I thought I would repost this so people would catch it, but it is relevant to our times:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/200...ort_of_god.php

Excerpted from the article:

My spiritual forebears did not take kindly to living under theocrats who embraced religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others. “Forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils,” thundered the dissenter Roger Williams as he was banished from Massachusetts for denying Puritan authority over his conscience. Baptists there were a “pitiful negligible minority” but they were agitators for freedom and therefore denounced as “incendiaries of the commonwealth” for holding to their belief in that great democracy of faith—the priesthood of all believers. For refusing to pay tribute to the state religion they were fined, flogged, and exiled. In l651 the Baptist Obadiah Holmes was given 30 stripes with a three-corded whip after he violated the law and took forbidden communion with another Baptist in Lynn, Mass. His friends offered to pay his fine for his release but he refused. They offered him strong drink to anesthetize the pain of the flogging. Again he refused. It is the love of liberty, he said, “that must free the soul.”

Such revolutionary ideas made the new


.....................As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: Bullies—political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies—cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own. This is never easy; these guys don’t fight fair; “Robert’s Rules of Order” is not one of their holy texts. But freedom on any front—and especially freedom of conscience—never comes to those who rock and wait, hoping someone else will do the heavy lifting. Christian realism requires us to see the world as it is, without illusions, and then take it on. Christian realism also requires love. But not a sentimental, dreamy love. Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught at Union Theological Seminary and wrestled constantly with applying Christian ethics to political life, put it this way: “When we talk about love we have to become mature or we will become sentimental. Basically love means…being responsible, responsibility to our family, toward our civilization, and now by the pressures of history, toward the universe of humankind.”

Christian realists aren’t afraid to love. But just as the Irishman who came upon a brawl in the street and asked, “Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?” we have to take that love where the action is. Or the world will remain a theatre of war between fundamentalists

[antiochian]

Funny how certain groups of Christians (namely the Puritans) that were persecuted abroad came here and began persecuting. That always struck me as strange. They deplored the tyranny of the English crown but exercised a tyranny of their own.

[ladyinred]

I guess what discourages me is Americans are too complacent with the status quo, they want "security" at the risk of losing their basic freedoms, in my mind there is no security without freedom.( And think about countries who don't have first amendment rights such as freedom of speech, where people are persecuted or tortured for speaking out,even now govt officials are lambasted for having dissenting views or views that disagree with the current policies) We need more brave souls like the early baptists mentioned in the article, people with guts,conviction and a vision and the spirit to match. Sadly Americans are not too much like their predecessors who would never have compromised on the principles of democracy and freedom.