Category Archive: Tools of Freedom

Aug 18

Private Virtue

We have been seduced to believe that righteousness is retreat from the world and that spirituality is weak trembling against action, potential error, and the vague hazy threat of failure.  But far, far worse is the endless campaign, the organized moral assault against success, effectiveness, and ability.  The heavens will pour down wrath, pride goes before a fall, and God will not share his Glory says the Mystic Despots with their vacant portents of disaster if we dare to conceive of a life beyond the mediocre.

This is how the enemy of our souls wins the wars of death and destruction. The advocates of life and prosperity quit the field.  Men retreat from social, religious, and political conflict as if their private virtue is a sufficient protest against vocal, defiant, demanding, insolent evil.  As if standing amidst the fight, raising a voice with passionate dissent, and waging a war of defense is to discredit the substance of virtue, to soil some mythical pristine righteousness.… Read the rest

Jul 17

Lives, Fortunes, and Sacred Honor

By John Immel 

(Click Here for Mp3 audio)

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. 

Declaration of Independence 1776

Freedom is a given in American experience: her people insulated from the tides of religious and secular despotism that dominates the whole of world history. Roughly five generations have been born into the independence that is America, and as always happens, the heirs of fortune never grasp what their great, great, great, great, great grandfathers worked to achieve. Liberty secured for posterity is not a divine right, but an encompassing stewardship. Failing to sustain the mental and physical rigor that created the wealth results in the inevitable generational erosion as the fortune slowly washes away into the abyss of irresponsibility, sloth, and entitlement. The symptoms of our cultural bankruptcy are expressed in a tide of intellectual evasion, soul-crushing guilt and social turmoil.… Read the rest

Sep 07

Consciousness: the Human CHOICE.

Consciousness The Human Choice (Click here to listen to an Presage Publishing MP3 Audio production)

By John Immel

The challenge before me, in my ongoing quest to address the sources of tyranny, is the dual task of deconstruction and construction.

Responding to historic tyrants and the philosophical bulwark offered by modern day theological and political shills is the process of deconstruction. It takes some effort to unravel what people from antiquity have said and why. And it takes more effort to cut through the intellectual demagoguery and elitism that masquerades as thoughtful, magnanimous wisdom. People need to see that the academic issues are not as cut and dried as those in the ivory tower, or under the miter and simar, would like to pretend.

The process of deconstruction is necessary because so many people don’t even know they are being tyrannized. They suffer the pain of authoritarianism but the historical doctrines tell them the pain is normal, the correct outworking of spiritual “truths.” So the work up till now has been to point to the pain and the ideas driving the pain and say: “uhh…hey… that isn’t the way that’s supposed to be.”

But the other side of this is offering an alternative, a superior synthesis of freedom.… Read the rest

Aug 22

Made Free

By John Immel

The Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. (John 8: 36)

From the inside, people hunger, yearn, and need

The cry of their soul; to be free indeed

Elusive like a reputation that cannot be bought

Corrupted by death, a hope vainly sought

Indulge my thoughts, my words, my whim

Give me no law, Give me no duty, Give me no sin.

The addict, The alcoholic, The Whore;

Doing as they please, bound by a fleshly door

Man is snared as surely as he lives

By his lusts, passions, enemies, and friends

Indulging his whims, fearing their wrath

Like a dog to its vomit, praise he must have

Freedom’s mother is Choice, its father is Want

Birthed of these parents man can plot his course;

Tyrants tremble, and slaves weep

for the power of choice, the power to keep

The counsel of one’s soul, the determination of desire

To live as one wills, to throw off the mire

To the free Joy no longer wars with grief,

Success is not stolen by failure’s thief

Liberty puts health and Life in the hands

A thrill in the heart where Courage stands

Embracing all, condemned by no expectation

Fearing no God, or man, or mortification

The melody of freedom sings over the shame

Destroys the guilt, and heals the pain

A life of choice: both good and bad

Overcoming the chaos, by word, by will, and hand

IF the Son, therefore shall make you free

To choose what you will, whatever you will be

Copywrite 2003 John Immel.  All rights reserved

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