‘You had no choices to make about your physical, mental, or emotional characteristics, your talents, your temperament, your genetic, environmental, or social endowments, neither your nature nor your nurture, nor even your inclinations or preferences.
I had nothing to do with who I am...? are you serious...?
‘The whole concept of “freeborn,” it seems to me, represents a failure to grasp your own fundamental condition.’
‘fundamental condition’; talk about a non referent...but I’ll take that to mean that I don’t acknowledge a divine spark in my formation, to which I would answer I am not an atheist, but an apatheist; it is not belief of it I lack, but a sense of its necessity...
That the categories I mentioned above are your endowments rather than your accomplishments, cannot be disputed.
That is not to say that you have no choices, or that your choices have not shaped --- as well as proceeded from--- who you "are." Everything we think, intend, say, and do, is both gift and task. But first, and enduringly, it's gift. And to be "task," you have to know what these gifts of yours are good for. (As in "good scissors.") How do you know you're a good man if you don't know what you're for? Anyone can just follow that they think will be self-fulfilling. Anybody can be Harvey Weinstein. Paradoxically, a world full of self-actualizing individuals, defining "good" and "evil" for themselves, and fulfilling themselves under the assumption they owe no "subservience" to anybody because they are "freeborn," would be unlivable..