Quote Originally Posted by Rumline View Post
Uhh what? Liberty and freedom, in their purest sense, is the ability to do whatever you want without restraint. Morality doesn't play into "freedom" at all. In fact morality can be considered a restriction on freedom. It may be a set of restrictions that society generally approves of, but it is still a restriction.

"Conviction" is the inability to be coerced into doing the wrong thing.
Conviction is a belief in something which is unshakeable. It can and often does inform your free will to do or not do this or that thing based on aforementioned unshakeable belief -- but it is not an infallible backstop of the opposite action. For example, you can have a "conviction" that it's absolutely wrong to murder someone, but still be coerced (or even choose freely) into doing so in fear for your own life or that of another, or simply because you choose to despite the belief. That you have a conviction in the wrongness of murder doesn't per se demand you won't commit it.
RE: freedom, liberty and license...
True freedom, the freedom that liberates, is grounded in truth and ordered to truth and, therefore, to virtue. A free person is enslaved neither to the sheer will of another nor to his own appetites and passions. A free person lives uprightly, fulfilling his obligations to family, community, nation and God. By contrast, a person given over to his appetites and passions, a person who scoffs at truth and chooses to live, whether openly or secretly, in defiance of the moral law is not free. He is simply a different kind of slave.
The counterfeit of freedom consists in the idea of personal and communal liberation from morality, responsibility and truth. It is what our nation’s founders expressly distinguished from liberty and condemned as “license.” The so-called freedom celebrated today by so many of our opinion-shaping elites in education, entertainment and the media is simply the license to do whatever one pleases. This false conception of freedom – false because disordered, disordered because detached from moral truth and civic responsibility – shackles those in its grip no less powerfully than did the chattel slavery of old. Enslavement to one’s own appetites and passions is no less brutal a form of bondage for being a slavery of the soul. It is no less tragic, indeed, it is in certain respects immeasurably more tragic, for being self-imposed. It is ironic, is it not, that people who celebrate slavery to appetite and passion call this bondage “freedom”?
Robert P George in Address to Hillsdale College.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/965223/posts

In his famous work, "Orthodoxy", GK Chesterton said "Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”

Is it any wonder then that the "artists" of today often come up with the most grotesque crap in an imitation of a life without limits? Enslaved, then, to nothing but ugliness and the whims of their passions, appetites, and stunted minds, they cannot produce beauty. An artist who works within the limits of his medium is restricted in an abstract sense, but by ignoring such boundaries is restricted entirely from his art. Similarly, we who are necessarily moral creatures, having a free will, are restricted more by vice than virtue. "Pure freedom" or an absolute ability to do whatever one wants is not only not freedom, it's impossible and absurd.