PROUD TO BE KNOWN AS LIBERAL
  by William Edelen

I have often heard myself referred to as "liberal." I cannot tell you how proud I am to be known by that classification. It is one of the most beautiful and cherished words in our language. It has nothing to do with whether you are a Republican or Democrat, a Unitarian, Presbyterian or Congregationalist. It has to do with an attitude...a frame of mind....an orientation to life and events...a philosophy...a concept having to do with freedom.

Liberal and liberty both have the same root,defined in "Webster's Dictionary" as: "The quality or state of being free...as a freeman...a free person...as opposed to slavery, bondage and subjection...worthy of a person of free birth...not servile or mean...a noble way...generous...open-handed...free from bigotry...inclined to welcome new ideas."

If liberalism is that which liberates -- which sets free the minds, spirits and bodies of human beings -- then how proud I am to be known as one who is dedicated to such a noble concept.

The object of liberalism is to free those caught in the chains of political, social and religious bondage. In a liberal religion a person arrives at his position through his own reason and experiences and not because of some outside authority. In the words of that great poem by James Russell Lowell, "Time makes ancient good vulgar.....they must upward and onward who would keep ABREAST OF TRUTH."

This attitude threatens those who want to deify the past and keep trying like ventriloquists to speak for a 2000 year old age in which they never lived. They reject all contemporary and biblical scholarship that cuts the ground out from under their traditional religious beliefs. But like schizophrenics, they want the benefits of contemporary knowledge and science in those areas that save their lives and heal their bodies. They do not reject the joys of telephones, television, jet plane travel or antibiotics. They are more than eager to accept the contemporary scholarship that saves their lives in hospital beds, if it seems that God is calling them to heaven but antibiotics would keep them on earth a little longer.

They do not want to die under a medieval, archaic King James doctor. But they would ask us to live by medieval King James religious beliefs. If science provides them with healing drugs they say that is "God's will" working through science and the doctors. But when that same wicked scholarship indicates that their bible is archaic and not true, then all of a sudden that same science and scholarship becomes the work of the devil...humanists...and liberals.

Truth is more holy than any creed, more sacred than any dogma. The true religious liberal respects only that theology that can hold up in the forum of unsheltered truth and can be justified in the light of all contemporary academic and scholastic research regardless of where it leads, and regardless of what cherished convictions must be relinquished. Any system other than this is to keep human minds and spirits in chains and fetters...in other words...BONDAGE.

It is worth being redundant to define liberalism again: "To set free from bondage and subjection...that which liberates...devotion to freedom."

I am very proud to represent freedom...and the future...and to be known as liberal.

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