Personal Freedom

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

IT'S THE NAKED TRUTH—Everybody needs support for personal freedoms in order to be and do their best for themselves, their dependents, and for their community and country. This is a big, complicated website where you could spend hours browsing all the pages, all of which are accessible to any adult. It's about creative, personal freedom in all its forms. It's about a philosophy called Progressive Nurturance that promotes and results from creative freedom with personal growth as an aim, and social growth as a result. It requires a devotion and practice of studied freedom to work. What is that about?

FREEDOM of expression—to think and say our thoughts—to choose and make alternatives—to create through art and innovation—of mobility, to move about and increase our knowledge and understanding of our fellow man, and to have them know about ourselves—of aspiration, to become our best selves and, through that, to build a better nation—of economics, to reward ourselves and also those who join our struggles to accomplish our goals—of politics, and of religion and from dogma and harassment—of security, to enhance our efforts with minimal thwarting threats, and the security that grows with understanding—to feel the thrill of new paradigms and the glow of epiphanies as new worlds open up to our explorations—to dare and lose, and lose again, and still again, until we win! Freedom, American style!– but, will we have to go somewhere else to find it?

Who deserves personal freedoms?—Gran'Pa's, of course, and those who defend their own rights while working to help others understand why they deserve their rights in spite of disagreement; those who would engage in constructive pursuits, whose aspirations promise their own personal advancement, by which their cultures benefit and, ultimately, the society in which they must thrive; those who seek to gain knowledge and an understanding of it for themselves, which they can apply to serve humankind in support of themselves in constructive and gainful ways; those whose goal is to circulate knowledge by any means possible for the advancement of all humanity, so that all of humankind can share an increased sense of self-worth, a possibility of attainment and a sense of some objectives beyond mere survival,  poverty, and enslavement to eternal pangs of hunger; those who simply want to live the best possible life while they obtain the means to chase their own private dreams.

Who deserves no personal freedoms?—Those who would prevent any of the above. Those who use the innocence of others to advance causes and activities which cost their freedoms and threaten the freedoms enjoyed by others; for the advancement of causes which serve to limit the potential of others to increase their knowledge and achieve aspirations inherent to their natures, and causes which deviate others from their paths to achievement, or other actions which serve to diminish the survival of others in fashions regarded as destructive and generally harmful, as in the dictionary definition of immoral; those who willingly take actions or make threats against the general welfare of humankind, and those who would enslave free thought to commercial interests. These, who diminish a whole culture's potential for attainment by such actions, and belittle or demotivate those who'd dare to reach for their higher aspirations, perform an immoral role as unrecognized criminals.

If you need to learn more, and about the natural basis that supports all of this, I recommend my little book, Reality 101.

These pages will introduce you to an accurate and verifiable view of reality that may be entirely new to you. While it leaves it up to the reader to wonder why, you will begin to realize why many ideas we depend on are entirely human creations and do not exist anywhere but in our minds. Most of our view of existence is, in fact, like that.

Does that make it all unreal, or just an illusion, as so many have claimed? No! Reality is not just chunks of material formed into recognizable shapes. Reality results from the way our natural perceptions work, and they work that way so we can survive as a result of trusting our own views of the world around us, and thrive as a result of all the ways we can contrive to perpetuate that.

It is a fact that we thrive as a result of applying our imaginations to the task of bettering the conditions in which we live. It is a fact that most of our modern perceptions—the ways in which we view existence that differs from those of natural primitives—result from imaginative ideas authorized into existence by common agreement, and which we now take for granted. Problems arise when we fail to recognize that, and allow others to manipulate us when such ideas get used against our better interests without our recognition of the kinds of events they are staging to exploit us for their own undeserved reward. Looking at events taking place in today's world, in the light shed by the information in this book, may frighten some people, but they will also be better armed for defending their own selves and those who depend upon them.

You can read more about the book, or make its purchase, just by clicking on its picture.

"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —