It would bless me to hear your liberation philosophy, DS. How do you define freedom? How is it realized and maintained?
These are deep and complex matters and it would require a lengthy essay to fully answer those questions, with citations from David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, and a whole lot of other people who've thought and written more deeply about such things than I have. I don't propose to do that on an Internet message board, nobody would read it and I haven't the time or inclination anyway. But I can make some of the main points.
Freedom means the ability to act without undue constraint, I can go where I want, do what I want, say what I want, think what I want, without fear of being suppressed by an oppressive and controlling apparatus of the state or any other organization. There are some necessary limits on it of course, hence the key word "unduly" in the previous sentence. I can't utter death threats against politicians I dislike, for instance, or promote hatred of certain groups or individuals, or--a common example in first year philosophy courses--shout "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre, unless of course there actually IS a fire. Freedom, in other words, is a political matter, not a religious one, and it's realized and maintained by a general consensus in an organized society that this is the way we want things to be, what Rousseau first called The Social Contract.
Religion offers the very antithesis of that, enslavement to a rickety ideology in which you are constantly under surveillance by some divine dictator that you can't get away from even by dying. After your death, in fact, is when the really serious judgment of you, and its consequences, happens, and you can be condemned solely on the basis of your thoughts, not what you've said or done. No civilized polity will hang you for what you think, but religion claims it can and will, even, or perhaps especially, after you're gone. It can't really, there's no real substance to that, but it's managed to frighten a lot of people into believing it can.
