Intellectual Freedom - It Isnt Free :: Politics Political

Intellectual drop outdom - It Isnt FreeWe have lingered in the chambers of the seaBy sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and embrownTill human voices wake us, and we drown.T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred PrufrockVery fewer of us are unfamiliar with the Genesis account of creation, where it is written that deity said, Let there be light, and there was light. 1 The obvious point is that divinity creates the dry land but later writings have chosen to focus on the idea that the divine being both creates and destroys by the power of His playscript alone. divinity spoke, and it came to be. 2 By the time of the Gospel of John was put to paper, we are informed that the watchword is not merely an expression of God it is, in fact, no less than God himself. 3 The word is divine. Especially after Augustine, who supply Christian doctrine as the road to God passing flat within self, the inner word has been seen not only as the writer of innermost self, but of conscienc e as well. 4 In terms of Augustinian inwardness, God is to be found in the intimacy of self-presence. 5 The inner triangulation of self involves what the Athanasian confidence referred to as the reasonable soul and the flesh as two elements, with God the third in between. 6 In fact, it is clear that the original construction of the outgrowth Amendment was devoted to protecting precisely this Augustinian notion of inner light, this inner word and presence of God. 7 This is what Tom Paine, chaplain to the American Revolutionary soldiers (and author of Common Sense) referred to when he wrote his well-known dictum that my own mind is my church. 8 As early as the 1740s, for example, it was the New Light Congregationalists (ironically connatural in theological outlook to the ill-omened Anne Hutchinson 9 ), who posed what became the central axiom of the American revolution the idea that independence of conscience is the inalienable right of every rational creature. 10 Not e how similar Paines notion of his own mind being his inner sanctum is to the trembler notion of the inner light, which Staughton Lynd described as the preamble to the political trustfulness of the Dissenter, as of the subsequent Declaration of Independence.