Rights & Freedoms: Reaching for greater freedoms, personal respect and recognition.
I was thinking about freedom and it occurred to me that I defined it by rights. It was an immediate visceral reaction. “It is my right! I have rights!” But the moment we define freedom by rights we have effectively limited the scope of what is free. We hold fiercely to our ‘rights’. We all do. But if we think of freedom in this manner as a group of rights, is not a right or a privilege an “allowment”? If I am being granted something, a privilege, then there is someone doing the granting and as such I am no longer free if someone needs to tell me. We would only be free at the behest of someone or something else, or within conditions they have determined.
The whole idea of freedom for me, seemed to a bit like trying to define God. If you define it, you have effectively said what God is not. So God then would need to be ‘beyond the name’ as it is said in Taoist writings. Nameless. Not because it can’t be known, but that it is by its nature beyond definition. Or, said in another way, that by defining it we are beginning from a place of limitations. It’s a rainbow. It is to be experienced.
Natural Rights & Legal Rights
Quoted from Wikipedia
