Saturday, October 02, 2004
"Free Spirits"? 
I have known and sure others have known folks who refer to themselves as "Free Spirits". I never did get what it meant really, apart from somewhat non-conformist..and I could live with that.. being a bit not the expected myself. After taking a quick Loose round the web, this sites seems to promote Free Spirits As anyone who goes to that site can see, the first associated link on the site is Astrology!
Have been reading my good bud, ;-) Martin Luther's book, Bondage of the Will. Where he makes an utter refutation of Erasmus' propagation of "Free Will" and this seems to be applicable to some degree too to those who refer to themselves as "Free Spirits". I think the true kind of Freedom is like ugh.name!! Good ole Google! I think the true kind of free Spirit would be the freedom hollered loudly, by William Wallace (providing the freedom hollering is an accurate depiction) in the movie Braveheart. But here is a short excerpt by Martin Luther on "Free Will" which by the same token seems to apply too, to "Free Spirits" or those who claim to be such:
"The Thing defined, if closely examined, is undoubtedly of greater extent than the definition. This is the kind of definition that the Sophists call vicious --that is, one in which the definition fails to cover the thing defined. For I showed above that "Free will" belongs to none but God only. You are no doubt right in assigning man a will of some sort, but to credit him with a will that is free in the things of God is too much. For all who hear mention of "Free Will" take it to mean in its proper sense, a will that can and does do, God-ward, all that it pleases, restrained by no law and no command; for you would not call a slave, who acts at the beck of his lord, free. But in that case how much les are we right to call men or angels free; for they live under the complete mastery of God (not to mention sin and death), and cannot continue by their own strength for a moment. Here then, right at the outset, the definition of the term and the definition of the thing are at odds, for the term connotes one thing and what is really in mind of another. It would be more correct to call it "veritable will" or "mutable will". In this way Augustine, and the Sophists after him diminish the glory and force of the term "free", qualifying it with this limitation, which they call the "vertibility " of "free will". And it becomes us to speak in the same way, lest we befool men's hearts with swollen and vain glorious words; as Augustine also think. We should speak according to a definite rule, in sober and proper terms; for what is wanted in teaching is implicitly and logical correctness, not the high-flown figures of a rhetorical persuasiveness."
"Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery. "
Lawana Blackwell,
Lawana Blackwell,
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