Freedom is Everything

It's a simple statement, but easy enough. Freedom is good.
I found this out when I was looking for an explanation for how Atheists can understand when something is good or when it is evil. They often rely on natural selection determinism, and say something like 'Because in general it promotes survival to do these things which are good, but (or even if) there is no absolute good.' I know that because I have said it before.
But it wasn't a complete enough explanation for me. Certainly the violent, moody, prejudicial gods of the most popular religions weren't even effective at Good. And the vague relativistic gods of the least popular religions were less concrete than the 'for survival' explanation; I can feel more specificity in my own mind than any of their explanations, and the simple survival explanation didn't cover apparently altruistic behavior in otherwise uncaring animals.

(Or maybe it eventually does and I don't know enough about their biology to know that. I am referring to Evolution, after all, which isn't exactly simple, fast, or easy to explain beyond the basic Darwin generalization.)


Still, I was looking for an explanation that's more discrete about what is good and what isn't, that applies universally without requiring a mandate, and can be explained without a huge knowledge of the universe. And with my own humanist views at the time, started with our own most abstracted value: Money.

Money can be good, and money can be bad. Think of if I need food, having, and then using, money is good. And having, spending, the same money on alcohol is bad. The choice ignored, one is good and the other is bad. But what made that so? Freedom. Spending the money on food brought me the freedom to not be hungry. But then spending it on alcohol brought me the freedom to get drunk, so what makes it bad? It takes away two freedoms: The freedom to not be hungry, and the freedom to think clearly.

And in that way, it hit me, Everything is about freedom. Every thing we do in our lives either uses, gains, or loses freedom. Every motivation we have is to change the amount of freedom we have, both as a society and as individuals. Freedom can be the metric of reality and imagination both. And so, Freedianity. It isn't a religion so much as an understanding that everything is about Freedom, and having a complete understanding of what that means.

I didn't expect my explanation of a universal, fundamental explanation of good and bad to apply even to mere matter and energy, or for that matter to the very origin of existence, but even on that grand cosmic scale, if you are willing to abstract the concept enough, (the freedom of energy to interact and form matter, and the freedom of matter to interact in more complex ways, etc,) Freedom is good.
I really didn't expect my concept of Good to reconcile so easily to the idea of a Universal Creator God, but once abstracted so deeply, Freedom is God, too: The source and nature of all reality.