Free Will, Government, and Easter

"You can break a man's skull. You can arrest him. You can throw him into a dungeon. But how do you control what's up here? How do you fight an idea?"
--Sextus (Ben-Hur)

As he has done in the past, Judge Nap reminds us of the link between freedom and Easter. This time around, he emphasizes government's tendency to compromise freedom and, by extension, free will.

"Freedom is the ability of every person to exercise free will without a government permission slip. Free will is a characteristic we share in common with God. He created us in His image and likeness. As He is perfectly free, so are we."

Government intrusion on freedom constitutes intrusion on free will. As such, government is stealing a gift from God. "It violates natural law; it prevents us from having and utilizing the means to seek the truth."

As God has told us, He has endowed each individual differently with respect to those means. For example, some individuals are endowed with huge reservoirs of economic resources while others have next to none. Why this is so is perhaps beyond our comprehension.

What we do know is that God does not prescribe the use of government force to even the distribution of means that he has endowed among people in the name of 'the common good.' Instead, He has told us thru His Son that it is up to us via our free will to decide whether to act peacefully to help others--perhaps thru voluntary cooperation and trade or thru charitable acts.

Easter demonstrates the role government often plays as agents of aggression who tread on individual free will.

It also demonstrates thru Jesus's acts that, even under the worst aggression imaginable, we need not surrender of free will in order to pursue the truth.