Monday, July 21, 2008

The Value of Choice

I have stated that I hold one single value higher than any other. That is the freedom of choice. The thing about freedom is that is comes with an inherent restriction; personal responsibility. The apostle Paul wrote in I Corinthians that "all things are permissible for me, but not all things are beneficial." Essentially, I have the freedom to do anything I want, but I have to know that I am responsible for my actions.
This is the area in which society is going quite the wrong direction. We are very comfortable proclaiming "I can do what I want..." The problem arises when things don't go quite to plan. Immediately we cry "who can I blame for this?" or something to that extent. It seems that we have even surpassed that point and have no desire to even place responsibility on the individual who causes the problems. If, as happened in Toledo at the beginning of the year, a driver who is intoxicated three times the legal limit enters the wrong way on the highway and kills five members of a family, the general consensus is that it's not his fault. Immediately after this accident, the general public and local authorities essentially shut down the bar at which he had been drinking. The mentality was that, "he should never have been served that much..."
While it is a tragic example, there is ultimately only one single person responsible. It has become politically incorrect to simply say, "that guy screwed up that time."

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