The Religious Roots of All There Is and Should Be (including Liberty)
The recent death of Milton’s Friedman’s widow, Rose Friedman, led their son David Friedman, a notable libertarian thinker in his own right, to reflect in this blog post on his own intuitions of immortality. Like an unfortunate number of libertarians, David is an agnostic or athiest, and his “best guess is that dead really is dead, that the person is software running on the hardware of the brain and when the hardware stops functioning the person ceases to exists,” despite “find[ing] it hard to entirely believe in death.”
My comment on his post was as follows:
Perhaps we should trust our senses, moreso than what we think we know, or can infer from all the evidence we’ve gotten secondhand, about evolution and how it is has hardwired our brains. Perhaps one of the most fundamental senses we should, must, trust is the sense that life makes sense. If everything we know will ultimately pass into oblivion, will eventually disintegrate into nothing but mindless space dust, then life makes no sense. Then there would be no point in doing anything, including talking or thinking about anything. But all of our science and all of our thinking and all of our doing is premised on our sense (the sense of all senses) that life makes sense.
I have my doubts about personal immortality in the way it’s generally conceived. But it’s enough that God, in whom we live and move and have our being, and who is more authentically us than we are ourselves, exists. In him no one and nothing is lost, including whatever charm and value we experience from being separate and individual souls during our fleeting time in this world.
My theology and epistemology is brilliantly summed up in this poem by Emily Dickinson:
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
How this all relates to the insights of libertarianism is described in this article by Rev. Edmund A. Opitz, titled “Religious Roots of Liberty,” the first two paragraphs of which I’ve excertped below:
Every variety of tyranny rests upon the belief that some persons have a right — or even a duty — to impose their wills upon other people. Tyranny may be fastened upon others by the mere whim of one man, such as a king or dictator under various names. Or tyranny may be imposed upon a minority “for their own good” by a democratically elected majority. But in any case, tyranny is always a denial — or a misunderstanding — of the mandates of an authority or law higher than man himself.
Liberty rests upon the belief that all proper authority for man’s relationships with his fellow men comes from a source higher than man — from the Creator. Liberty decrees that all men — subject and ruler alike — are bound by this higher authority which is above and beyond man-made law; that each person has a relation to his Maker with which no other person, not even the ruler, has any right to interfere. In order to make these conceptions effective for liberty, they must be deeply ingrained in the fundamental values of a people. That is to say, they must be part of the popular religion. There was one people of antiquity for whom this was true, the people who gave us our Old Testament. It was among the ancient Israelites that the conviction took hold and emerged into practice that there was a God of righteousness whose judgments applied even to rulers.
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