Freedom of Thought

"Ever since the dawn of civilization, ever since the first humans began
to grasp the significant fact that they were individual beings in a
universe that seemed to be more or less hostile to them, the entire
search of the human mind, its whole endeavor, has been to get free from
evil, from bondage and the shackles of lack, want, fear, superstition,
uncertainty, pain, disease, poverty, and fear of the hereafter. And
because of this, human systems exist -- organized philosophies spring
up, sciences develop, educational systems are conducted, collective
security is sought after, and religions are formulated to allay the fear
of humankind relative to the soul.
  
The great demand in the world today is for a sense of security, freedom,
and liberty. But we must be very certain that we do not swap one image
of bondage for another. I have read a large part of the religious and
philosophic history of the world and I have noticed that almost
invariably, when the world traded one kind of religion for another, it
didn't get a good deal. The Pilgrim Fathers who came to the shores of
New England came to worship God in their own way, but the moment they
got there, everybody in the colony worshiped God in the way that the
strong-minded members of that colony decided was the way to worship God.
That was not freedom.
 
Even in our newer religions of the last seventy-five or a hundred years,
very frequently we meet people who say they have now found the truth,
and then, unfortunately, a large majority of them disclose that they
merely have found an idea they liked and called it the truth because
they were egotistical, self-conscious, self-righteous people with an
attitude of condemnation toward others. That is not the truth. In
studying one system of thought after another that has transpired in the
last seven thousand years of human history, I have noted how extremely
difficult it is for the human mind to conceive liberty without license,
without egotism; and we can only give birth to freedom when we have
conceived liberty.
 
True freedom -- true liberty -- has something cosmic behind it. If the
time has come that modern science has proved that we cannot move a piece
of paper without changing the balance of the entire physical universe;
if we have come to the place where we know that the stuff of which our
physical bodies are made is the same stuff of which the planets are
made; if we have come to the place where such a profound unity is
maintained that physicists believe there is no such thing as disunity in
the physical world; then we can easily see what the great spiritual
leaders of the ages meant when they told us of that greater unity in
which we all live and move and have our being, and that the idea of
freedom itself is tied up with the true concept of the unity of good. If
our nature is one, if God is one -- and we know that God must be one,
for the universe cannot be divided against itself -- then we are all
tied into an indivisible unity. We shall have to get back to this unity
to find the meaning of freedom. 
 
Nothing in any part of this cosmic whole could be considered freedom
that would destroy the liberty of some other part of it. That would be
self-destruction, would it not? As Jesus pointed out two thousand years
ago, that would be a kingdom divided against itself. The kingdom of God
is one kingdom. So we know that true liberty must spring from true
unity.
 
We are bound into a supreme unity, we are tied into an immutable law of
irrevocable cause and effect -- that is unity moving into action. Cause
and effect is something that happens as a result of the use of unity.
Consequently we are one even while we are many, and since each one of us
is a part of the whole, if we seek to destroy each other we only
ultimately hurt ourselves. That is the great lesson of life."
  
Ernest Holmes
 
Taken from "Ernest Holmes speaks" 
  
http://cornerstone.wwwhubs.com/ernestholmes.htm