Our Founding Fathers spoke and wrote time and again about the necessity for a free people to have freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to know, freedom to ask questions about what is going on and why the people in authority do what they do.
If freedom of speech were limited or abolished, they said, tyranny would follow and people would be turned into slaves. It was paramount to them that the democracy they were inventing would only succeed if people were free to speak up, even if it would be contrary to political and religious dogmas, dictates and traditions (DDT!).
The Founding Fathers based their knowledge on history and today we can take a glimpse around the world, even our own, and see how true they were in their view of the necessity of freedom of speech and how its abolishment leads to ruination and destruction of any human society.
In the history of the beginning of mankind as written in the second chapter of the Bible, we are told that humankind, personified as Adam and Eve, were to follow the dictates (commandments) of the ruler, whom they later referred to as Lord, or God!
They, Adam and Eve, as reported in the biblical narrative, depended upon their Lord for everything: their being created and their daily livelihood. They were told not to ask any questions, just merrily “eat” from the Tree of Life and obediently refrain from “eating” from the Knowledge Tree, which, as we are told, had answers to questions about true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, positive and negative.
In other words, and in our modern way of speaking, they were told no freedom of speech. The punishment for not obeying the Lord, the punishment for “eating” his DDT, was exclusion from the realm and condemnation to a life of chaos, codependence, pain and death.
This biblical narrative of how it all began and how human life ought to be lived, is, like many historical narratives, written with a certain bias. The chronicler tells it from an absolutist’s monotheistic point of view, a view of a god fashioned after the prevalent view of his political society, that is, a dictatorial monarchy.
Like in many such societies, the monarch eventually turns into a tyrant, destroying the very society he is lording it over, And so it is, that in further historical narratives in the Bible, God is portrayed, and portrays himself, as the only know it all tyrant, justifying slaughtering people that do not agree with his DDT!
In short, from the very first chapters, the biblical God is a tyrant who condemns freedom of speech!
Jake Horth
Grand Marais
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