I’ve come to truly believe that most confuse freedom with nihilism, across all political spectrums.
Freedom, through liberty, as termed in the 18th century, is important to appreciate, to understand the colonial breakaway and founding of the United States. We look back at it now with a quarter of a millennium of distorted filters, revisions, and agendas.
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This Easter weekend usually features a broadcast airing of Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments. In the nearly four hours of dialogue, the most consequential line, the meaning of the entire film, from Moses is, “Freedom comes from the Laws of God.”
From our 21st-century vantage, this may seem difficult or even impossible to accept. It has both religious and philosophical implications. If the former is a bridge too far for you, focus on the latter, as a philosopher would.
When we view freedom through a purely secular lens, it rapidly decays into a demand for absolute individual license—the nihilistic notion that freedom is simply the ability to satisfy any impulse, regardless of duty or order. This modern obsession with “doing whatever one pleases’ is not liberty; it is the elevation of the ego above the natural and divine hierarchy.
We must recover the classical Christian understanding: true freedom is not the license to do as one pleases, but the power to do what one ought. As Pope John Paul II elucidated, freedom finds its ultimate purpose in the voluntary acceptance of Christ. Once the will is firmly set upon Him, the chaos of human appetites is replaced by a divine order, and the tension between individual liberty and moral responsibility is resolved.
In this light, the Founders’ vision becomes clear: they did not seek a vacuum of authority, but a structure of liberty that acknowledged the sovereignty of God. To pursue freedom without this foundation is not to be free at all—it is merely to be adrift in a sea of our own appetites, waiting for the inevitable collapse of the society that allows such license to persist.
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To sum up, I have no objection to religious (or philosophical) belief, provided it does not impact others. Freedom from religion is just as important as freedom of religion. However I do object very strongly to religious dogma which implies that people who are free from religion are nihilists incapable of morality thoughts and actions. It is demonstrably false and I see nothing in your writings which attempts to justify such an assertion.
Let’s leave it there, Paul, and enjoy our journey in astronomy.
I appreciate you clarifying your position. However, I want to be crystal clear: I agree with you completely that people who are “free from religion” are fully capable of moral thought and action. My article never asserted, nor implied, that non-religious people are incapable of morality or are inherently nihilistic.
Likely, a few different choices of words in a couple of spots would have left some of my ideas less open to interpretation. Still, I stand by my original phrasings.
My argument was, and remains, that an objective moral framework is essential to the preservation of freedom, regardless of the source or label one attaches to that framework. You are arguing against a ‘”dogma” that I do not hold.
Since we have clarified that fundamental misunderstanding, I am happy to agree that it is a good time to pull back from the philosophy and enjoy our shared interest in astronomy. Cheers.
To be clear, the dictionary definition of nihilism is: “The belief that life has no meaning or purpose and that “religious and moral principles” have no value”. It seems to me that Nihilism is a word which is commonly used by religion enthusiasts to denigrate non-believers.
Many mutations of religion often end up with opposing principles (because they can’t even get their own story straight!). Yet apparently they are not “nihilistic” because they are still so called “religious principles”.
The only part of the above definition which I whole-heartedly agree with is that “religious principles” have no value. So you are partially correct, although I could argue that I do have one religious principle, which is that all religious beliefs are unworthy of belief.
Evolution has set the necessity of “survival long enough for reproduction” as the purpose of all living species, including humans. Other than that, I would say with some confidence that we were all non-believers at birth. The only meaning or purpose which humans possess are (i) those which we attribute to ourselves as individuals; or (ii) other ideas which have been stuffed into our brains by parents, school teachers, priests, peer pressures etc.
I reject religions – all 3,000+ of them. I regard them as a menace to humanity, having scant regard for evidence, a propensity for bullying and making up their own house rules – and pronounce them as “God’s Law”.
Added to this is religion’s ignorant, erroneous, insulting and unintelligent proposition (which I have heard so often during my eighty years as a guest on this planet), that because of our world view of believing only what we see around us, we atheists cannot conceivably possess any moral principles. This is included in a long mental list of reasons why I will never submit to any of their weird concepts again.
There’s that word again.
As for the ten unverified components of the primitive christian “God’s Law”, I understand that many in your country like to see them displayed in public places, forcing their own beliefs onto others.
Three of the ten components are the pretentious nonsense of a vain imaginary being, two have some merit and five are common law principles which existed before religion. Laughably, there is no mention of democracy, being kind to people, ethical behaviour, slavery, child molestation, rape, fraud, fighting wars, sexual and gender equality, obeying the laws set by an elected Parliament, etc.
If only god had given Moses an encyclopaedia of modern law. Better still a comprehensive handbook on physics. But most of all he could have outlawed religious institutions which propagate mistruths and take advantage of gullible people.
🙃
Hi Roger,
I appreciate the thoughtful reply, as always, which is well-aligned with all of your writings through the years.
It’s fair to contend that “nihilism” has been weaponized by some. But that’s a complaint about other people’s rhetoric.
If you equate philosophers, thinkers as religious, so be it; the Stoics, Aristotle, and Confucius were not so in any conventional sense. They were thinkers observing the same reality and arriving at remarkably convergent conclusions.
I could throw in slightly less-ancient philosophies from the likes of Locke and Tocqueville to show the core tenet is universal. Yes, even Locke, for whom freedom was never mere license, but liberty within the bounds of natural law.
“When we view freedom through a purely secular lens, it rapidly decays into a demand for absolute individual license—the nihilistic notion that freedom is simply the ability to satisfy any impulse, regardless of duty or order.
What on Earth gives you that weird idea?
Hi Roger, that’s a fair challenge, and I wouldn’t expect anything less.
It’s not weird at all—from a variety of historical persuasions. When I look around and assess the trajectory of society I’ve witnessed my entire life, I have to ask: what doesn’t give me that idea?
I’m not making a hypothetical argument, but an observational one. It is observable today, it was observable millennia ago, that when a culture severs freedom from any transcendent grounding – whether called God, natural law, or even a classical philosophical framework – what fills the vacuum? It’s not enlightened rational humanism, but what our ancestors described as “appetite,” the raw assertion that “my freedom means you cannot tell me no.”
Our views on this could be quite different, starting with geography. Mine is rooted in the States, while yours (if I can extrapolate) comes from Europe and Australia. Still, I see how freedom is invoked today across the political spectrum, at least in America. On the left, it is wielded to dismantle every inherited norm and institution as “oppressive.” On the right, it has become a libertine refusal of any communal obligation – “don’t tread on me” extended to absurdity. I doubt Ben Franklin would have agreed with either side. Both have reduced freedom to the same core idea: the removal of all constraint on the self.
Though I used Biblical analogies in the article, you don’t have to accept the religious framing. This is, fundamentally, a classical philosophical problem.
(And I have always enjoyed intersecting the soft sciences to find their commonalities and, hopefully, a closer understanding of truth.)
Plato’s democracy-to-tyranny arc contends that when freedom is defined as pure license, the appetitive soul rules, and collapse follows. Aristotle grounded the free man’s virtue in telos – purpose, right ordering toward an end. And the Stoics in Athens held that true freedom was mastery over one’s passions, not indulgence of them. None of these were Christian thinkers, and all of them would have found our modern definition of freedom incoherent.
This isn’t merely a Greek or Western insight. I first encountered these ideas in college during a class on Eastern philosophy that examined how their major thinkers understood the soul and human nature. Confucius warned that liberty without ritual propriety and virtue collapses into social disorder under the “Mandate of Heaven.” Buddha taught that freedom from suffering requires mastering craving rather than obeying it. Laozi saw true liberty in harmonizing with the Dao (“the Way”), not chasing every desire. These non-Christian, non-Western traditions all reached the same conclusion: freedom as pure license is incoherent and self-undermining.
So what I’m saying isn’t weird at all. It’s actually the historical norm.
Some will argue these ideas are obsolete compared to our current scientific advancement, but the human psyche remains biologically identical to what it was in the time of the Buddha or Aristotle. The ‘experiment’ of ignoring that reality is what is truly untested.
What’s genuinely novel, and genuinely weird, is the post-Enlightenment experiment of trying to sustain a concept of freedom with no metaphysical ground beneath it.
The “weird idea” is that we can strip freedom of all duty, all ordering principle, all hierarchy of goods, and somehow not end up with nihilism.