Viewing Freedom From Different Eyes

It is deeply saddening to see, again, such an increase in the attacks within Iraq. Just as the world slowly began to exhale, now we find insurgents releasing a torrent of bombings and shootings in recent days. If anyone expected the Iraqis to be happy just to be rid of their dictator, they must be feeling a little disappointed.

Amidst all the demonstrations against the continuing Allied occupation, there have even been expressions of nostalgia for the old regime. It reminds me of the Israelites complaining bitterly that Moses only led them out of slavery in Egypt so they could die of hunger in the desert.

Yesterday one newspaper reported a particularly shocking slogan, painted on the wreckage of an armoured vehicle: ‘Hell with Saddam is better’, it said, ‘than paradise with the Americans.’ Maybe it was meant ironically. Life before ‘liberation’ was hell for sure, but at least there was water and electricity, and some sort of civil order.

What kind of ‘paradise’ is anarchy and chaos? There is another interpretation. For many cultures, self-determination is a matter not of an individual being able to make their own choices, but of a people having the power to do so. We’re told that many Iraqis would rather their nation ran its own affairs, even if it meant suffering under a home-grown tyrant, than enjoy this right and that right on the say-so of a foreign power.

It’s an attitude we in the self-centred, personal-freedom-loving West perhaps find difficult to comprehend. Two world views may be clashing here: one which sees the welfare of their individual as paramount, and one which puts first the interests of the group.

And yet I wonder if their perspectives are so very different after all. Both alike see liberty in terms of some kind of autonomy. ‘We’d rather go to hell than be pushed around – even pushed into paradise – by someone else,’ says the graffiti in Iraq. It isn’t a million miles from the spirit that sometimes seems to prevail in the West, that insists on our right to do whatever we want, whatever the consequences.

The Iraqis are a proud people, the commentators say. And so are we all. We’d rather stand on our own two feet and be damned than be told what to do. Which side, I wondered, would the Bible come down on: the precious freedom of the individual, or the inalienable right of a community to decide its own destiny?

The answer, I think, is just as disturbing as that painted slogan. In the end, the Bible says, true happiness, true liberty doesn’t consist in any kind of self-determination, but in our recognition that we belong to God and our submission to His will, and His alone. Hell on our own terms, or paradise on God’s.

Why do we find it so difficult to decide?


Lord God, we live with the constant temptation to want power over the wills of others more than we want compassion in our own souls; May Your gentle touch on our souls, Your gentle words in our inner ears, Your gentle example to our spiritual sight, be the making of us, and of our community and nation and world. Amen