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Freethought Is The Hallmark of Mature Human Beings

By DealDoctor --

Note: This is a REALLY long rant. Do NOT read it if you are busy and stop reading anytime it loses meaning for you. If you have time and a cup of coffee go for it. It hits on fundamental issues that underly the freethinkers opposition to religious and political totalitarianism.

My car does not think it simply obeys my command. I get to think and it is simply obeys and in fact it is forced to obey. It has zero choice in the matter. It is less than a child. It is certainly no human being.

When my children were small they also did not really get to be freethinkers. When it came time to crossing the street they simply held my hand and crossed when I thought it was time to cross. They might as well have been my car at that point. My force insured that I was the thinker and that they obeyed. My hand was the stronger hand and my idea of the best action was the idea that resulted in their action when they were small. Today it is a much different matter I assure you. They are all free thinkers and no longer hold my hand at the crossings that come along their way. I call that success. I am a friend but no longer a master. My goal has always been just that and I earlier only wanted to insure their safety for this day to arrive so I held their hand with force when they were small. Yes, children are human but not really mature human beings. They need their hands to be held by loving parents.

When a criminal attacks you on the street to steal your money you do not get to be a freethinker then either. The thug has the gun and they do the thinking. When they say the best idea at the moment for you is for you to give them your wallet they are forcing you and you might as well be their car or their kid. Are you picking up on the role of force in this stuff?

Slaves of ever age and time know better than to try to be free thinkers. The reason is there is always the power of some force to insure the thinking of the master is sufficient for both slave and master alike. It works the same way for most people 9-5 today as well. Do you feel you are in a free society in the work place? Tell the boss to fuck off and watch their kingly side arise. Now we see so clearly why so many hate their jobs so often it is a cloaked slavery. They cannot be themselves at work because they must be who their employer tells them to be and say what the employer says for them to say. This is the "game face" people have to put on at work that so compromises their own sense of integrity and authenticity. Most employees have long forgotten they have the power to leave their employment to seek a another job in the same way immigrants have the power to leave their homeland with great risk but high hopes of something better.

Things, children, domestic animals on their leashes, serfs, and slaves are all not free thinkers. Only sovereign individuals can be freethinkers. Societies are not free thinkers. Institutions are not free thinkers anymore than prisoners in a cell are free to have unrestricted action. Tribes and teams are not free thinkers either. If the quarterback repeatedly does not run the play the coach sends into the game they will soon be benched. Communities are not freethinkers. Only mature individuals may be freethinkers and few of them have the courage to break the chains of the tribe, tradition, the family, the community, the institution, the nation, the employer and pay the price required to be a free person who thinks freely and fewer still act according to their own free thoughts. We are talking not about information here but about courage now. Freedom really is not free.

What is actually at issue here is the very nature of being a human being. Wolves run in packs and primitive tribes are not much further evolved, or should I say enlightened, because the tribe with a chief making the decisions for the actions of the group functions in many ways like the leader of a pack of wolves. The individual is but a resource and has no value as individual. Individuals like professional football players are interchangeable and subject to trade. It is the position of quarterback or CEO that is of value to the pack. Kings and popes are pack leaders. Those who function as their serfs and members are but slaves and a member of a body that acts with the leader as the only freethinker allowed. Only the leader is an individual and the sad thing is that even the leader must think in ways that have limits because to think in fresh ways can see the entire tribe rise up and kill them. A silly echo of that may be seen in Florida’s governor’s race where the incumbent Charlie Crisp began to act in ways that his own Republican audience saw as liberal in support of the Obama administration. His support in the polls dropped so low he left the party to become an independent. The group would not allow him to be a freethinker and disagree with them without a negative response. No group allows ever allows that we think freely. If we express unconventional thoughts we should be sure to expect a reaction from those who do not hold them. Perhaps an exception to that is when all the power resides with the freethinker as with a pope and their church or a master and their own slaves. Those governed may plot to kill their leader but they will not usually speak against him while unarmed.

Did you not get a thrill during the movie “Braveheart” when Mel Gibson in the face of torture bellowed, “FREEDOM!”? I sure did. Damn guy was fully mature human at that point!

The key issue here is that if freethinking is what separates us as a species from the instinctual behavior of ants, then to shackle the free thoughts of an individual presses them back down the evolutionary chain. To shackle thought and the free actions that result from those free thoughts is to prevent humans from functioning with their uniqueness. It would be like removing the power and speed of a lion and expecting them to survive. A strong stag chained to a tree in the forest will soon starve and become the victim of the smallest of creatures. If we are to pursue life, liberty and happiness we must be free to think of what is best for our own self-interest. To chain a mind to the past or to the thoughts of other minds is to stab the heart of the nature of humankind.

Today is Sunday and as I flipped channels I heard one preacher saying that only obedience makes God smile. I heard another preacher say that we may not know why God wants us to obey a given thing but we can always take the first step in that direction until another step is revealed. Since there really is no god it is obvious who is the one being obeyed here. The preachers and the institutions they lead all benefit from the “obedience to God” that they repeat over, and over, and over, and over and…. Over. Just trust me and obey me and there really is no other ways guys. Machines, beasts of burden, children, slaves, serfs, and believers are not allowed to be free thinkers. They are forced to only be non-personal "obeyers". Whips, stronger hands, chains, guns, and threats of hell are all used to force obedience and prohibit freethinking and its fruit of rebellion against the authority of the one who is allowed to think or who themselves may be chained to the thoughts of the dead.

The United States of America was the first country in the history of the world that had a Constitution to limit the force and power of the government. Kings had no such limit on what they could do to individuals. Popes could burn a witch or torture a heretic in cruel and unusual ways without so much as a whisper of opposition. The people were not seen as individuals they were just resources for the common good of the kingdom or church. The king and pope was the only one who decided what was best for the common good and it was usually what benefited the king and pope and the institution that supported their own power.

The Constitution of the U.S. in no way limited the freethinking or free action of any citizen. It was written to limit the actions of the government over free individuals who for the first time in history were seen to have value as individuals instead of just parts of the body of Christ or body politic of which the king was the head. Individuals counted as value. The community as a whole or body politic was not the basis of value that had always been the repeated mantra of totalitarian and mystical dictators throughout all of history. Hitler went on and on about the sacrifices the German people needed to make for the Fatherland. Kennedy influenced with all that Roman Catholic communal thinking, said ask not what the country can do for you but rather what you could do for the country. The government here was once again to be the master and the citizen but a servant. What happened to the government being a servant? What is wrong with a free citizen asking what the government might do for them? Who is serving whom here? The individual here in all these cases is but a human resource for the real end which is the tribe, the pack the community, the family, the society. What is not said is that some individual or gang of individuals or elites of some kind reaped the rewards and used the human resources FORCED to obey their thinking. The U. S. Constitution was all about LIMITING THE FORCE of the government SO THAT the individuals who now had value just because they were individuals could think freely and act freely in their best interest. It was all about people no longer being taken care of by the Founding Fathers or by Papa Pope or by the Divine King appointed by God. It was about people letting go of daddy’s hand and crossing the street when their own freethinking said it was time to cross. The new kind of government was to free people to finally grow up to what they always were meant to do think and act as free agents. The only actual freedom is individual freedom. My own children left home one at a time.

The government’s proper role was only to respond with force when one individual used force or fraud against another individual. Even with grown children a father and perhaps a couple of other family members will jump in to stop one brother from attacking the another with a knife. The government was limited in its actions to govern and limit individuals only to protect and secure the rights creation had so clearly given to them as individuals. The government rightly was put in place to limit force among individuals so that all individuals might think and act freely without fear of their own fellow citizens. The act of government properly is to protect the citizens’ rights given by nature, which are to think and to act freely for their own best interest. The government may only act to use force against a free citizen when that citizen has initiated force or fraud against another citizen. To suppress force initiated by a citizen with a greater government force is simply to maintain peace among the governed so that free speech, argument and persuasion not brute force are the tactics of freethinking rational citizens. Only such a society is civilized and has left totalitarian or mystical non-rational domains that are based not on reason but on brute force. To make a society civilized instead of a barbaric tribe the use of force must be given to the government and the government must be limited in its use only to respond to force that is initiated by citizens.

The government is in a true civilization there to DEFEND the natural FREEDOM and to protect the PEACE of the free individual citizens. The citizens, not the government, much less any dreams visions and plans of the government bureaucrats, are the value in a free society. Barbaric, totalitarian, and mystical societies that are not based on freethinking abound in bloodshed and force exercised against their own constituency. The small percentage of criminals in a society are not nearly the actual threat to the individual humans citizens as aggressive self serving governments that do not value the free thought, free actions of the individual citizen. The citizens do not belong to the government. They are not its citizens. It is an it. They are humans. Ever hear of a political machine?

In our own case when the U. S. was founded, our constitution recognized us all as free citizens. We agreed to be a nation of objective laws that applied to all citizens instead of being serfs subject to the whims of a king or pope. The government RIGHTLY was authorized to be the PEACE KEEPER domestically with police, internationally with the military and between citizens with the courts. Individuals in a RATIONAL society simply do not use FORCE as brutes they use argument, persuasion, demonstration, and produced value to win others to their opinions and ways. Citizens were free to do ALL THINGS except those forbidden by laws which were all in place to make sure force and fraud were not used against any of us as free citizens.

The government was limited from doing ANYTHING that did not secure our natural rights to be free thinkers and free actors because its purpose was to protect and secure those rights within a tranquil environment. It simply was there to create an environment of domestic tranquility for free people to think an act freely. It was not put in place to be the biggest bully on the block telling all citizens what they must do for their idea of the common good. THAT pack mentality was exactly what the constitution was drafted to protect us from in the first place. My how things have changed.
Now it seems the game has been changed to gather votes for the individual or party who’s vision will be f-o-r-c-e-d by positive laws upon us all. Freethinking just took a hike. In the beginning the vote was to put people in place that would secure our own right to have our own visions and pursue our own life, liberty and happiness.

Free speech, Freedom of assembly, Free Press, Freedom from being FORCED is the uniqueness of our experiment. All that goes to a deeper root and that is the freedom to THINK and ACT in their own self-interest. They get the set the PREFERENCES on their own computer. There is choice that takes into account their own individual intelligence, context and goals. Without freethinking there is no real freedom for INDIVIDUALS at all. The less than obvious think is that each and every one of us is an INDIVIDUAL and without freethinking And without the free self-interested actions that result from freethinking in a free society we are but slaves to majority pack or politician who leads a power gang.

As such the religion pack and the dictator-politician’s pack suppresses what make humans human and that is free thought. An oligarchy of elites who take it upon themselves to do the thinking for the community and FORCE their visions of what is good for the community upon all the individuals in the community is no less a form of slavery than any other. The majority in a democracy which is unchecked and unlimited by written objective law is one more form of totalitarianism. Slaves in our nation’s history are but one example of that fact. Only when a government is limited to preventing criminal, fraudulent, and military force from destroying the inalienable rights nature gives to each and every individual can free thinking by any individual have any meaning at all. “Society’s good” and “common good” are impersonal ideas not personal entities. Like machines, animals, and brain dead rocks they do not think at all. Thinking has always been done and always will be done by- individuals. It is only for securing the good of individuals that government should exist at all. When a government aspires to doing the thinking for individuals it is a cover for the thinking of a tyrannical individual or gang of individuals at the top. What makes the thinking of those individuals hiding behind the screen of a political or mystical institution more valuable than your own freethinking –for you?


It is clear to see why their freethinking might be best for them and for their smokescreen of “common good”. However, I am not at all interested in being a sacrificial animal for Hitler’s Fatherland, some king’s kingdom, Bush or Obama’s vision for a perfect world individuals idea of what is best for my life, liberty and happiness. I only want the freedom to pursue what as a free citizen what I myself with my own freethinking conclude to be best for me. I do not want anyone or any gang of politicians forcing me to think or act for their vision or goal of tomorrow. I support 100% the government’s role to keep the peace with force. We should note that our forefathers did have such a strong distrust of government’s illegitimate use of force that we insisted on the right of our individual citizens to bear firearms, not to shoot one another or to shoot deer, but to protect themselves from totalitarian governmental actions like the ones we so recently knew from the king of England. It was our own firearms that limited the power of that king’s despotic government and our founding fathers knew that only too well. Force can only be met with force not logic and thus the police, courts and military are legitimate needs of a civilized free nation. Force can keep the environment safe for freethinking, actions and free trade. That alone is the legitimate use of force among rational people.

My own freethinking has directed me to the conclusion that freethinking for all individuals is the best thing for them as well so long as their freethinking does not seek with gun or chain to force me to think like them. In that case it is time to say once more, “ Give me Liberty (of thinking and action) or give me death! “ The very life of a human AS A HUMAN is the issue of free thought. The very life, liberty and happiness of each of us as individuals may only be secured by freethinking because the freedom to reason and to act in our self-interest based on the conclusions of reason are what defines us as humans instead of beasts of burden or machines.


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