For Passover and Easter: celebrate freedom

Legal Insurrection ^ | 04/18/2014 | neo-neocon

[Rusty0604]

It’s the holiday season, one of those rare years when Passover and Easter come close together, as they did during the original Easter. So I get a twofer when I wish my readers “Happy Holidays!”

...whenever I’ve attended a Seder I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that,... freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence, which also cites the Creator:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad, sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny...

Is freedom a “basic need, then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they thought of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met: "We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs..."