A Brief Examination of Religious Freedom. Although I believe I invented the concept of religious sovereignty as the ultimate form of peoples, or ‘mass’, sovereignty, I could not have done so without the benefit of having lived in a country with a long tradition of political freedom and, hence, democratic sovereignty behind it. Certainly I am no democrat, in the usual essentially parliamentary/puritan sense, and have never felt myself to be other than an Irishman living in English exile. But I am aware that, in the broader sense, religious freedom is a stage beyond political freedom, and that religious, or theocratic, freedom would be inconceivable without political freedom as its necessary precondition. The one kind of freedom could be said to precede the other, since freedom from political tyranny is what makes democracy democratic, and if you are to be free from political tyranny there is always going to come a time when you have to be free from religious tyranny as well, not simply in the Protestant and especially Puritan sense of being free from Catholic or Anglican persecution, but, more generally, in terms of taking freedom to its logical conclusion, which is freedom from all forms of tyranny, including arguably the oldest form of tyranny as that which wears a religious mask. But at bottom such religious tyranny is less theocratic than autocratic, and therefore less germane to God the Father conceived in metaphysical terms than to Devil the Mother hyped as God in relation, fundamentally, to metachemistry. Even with the relative religious freedom that accompanies the relative, or worldly, political freedom of parliamentary democracy, namely the freedom of Puritanism to dissent from State religion, we do not have a situation in which Devil the Mother hyped as God has been both exposed and, finally, rejected … in favour of a truer, more genuine (compared to anything traditional) concept of and relationship with God the Father. On the contrary, even Puritanism retains some links, no matter how much the more radical elements may deny it, with the Old Testament and, hence, with the Bible in general, which in England has come to be known as the King James Bible. Such a Bible may be more Anglican than Puritan, but few Puritans would be so exclusively New Testament as to be bereft of any association with the Old Testament, even if their concept of the Bible would favour the New Testament, as in relation to the Gideon form of it. Protestantism, neither in its Anglican nor Puritan manifestation, provides a mandate for the rejection of the Bible in toto, and therefore it remains affiliated with both the lie of Devil the Mother hyped as God and the Christic extrapolation from this lie which finds its fulcrum in the New Testament. Catholicism, too, despite its unique postulate of a post-resurrectional Saviour ‘On High’ which, particularly in Ireland, lends itself to axial criteria at variance with those of England and even of Great Britain and the UK in general, is also hamstrung by Biblical norms, both in relation to the Old Testament and the New Testament, and falls demonstrably short, in consequence, of the kind of religious freedom which would be commensurate with a more developed sense of metaphysics coupled, for females, to antimetachemistry at the northeast point of our intercardinal axial compass. It is both freer and less free than its Protestant counterparts, for while it may lay special claim to some degree of association with the northeast point of our axial compass which is completely alien to Protestantism, it is still tied to Old Testament criteria and in no position to affirm religious freedom independently of such criteria, including from the acceptance of Devil the Mother hyped as God which, in time-honoured paradoxical fashion, has passed muster for God the Father in the sense of loosely equating, within a Christian context (necessarily at variance with Judaism), with Jehovah as cosmic First Mover and effective Creator. Even Puritans have more freedom to the extent that their relationship with the Bible would favour the New Testament at the expense of the Old, much as they would be affiliated with parliamentary democracy rather than with constitutional monarchy in the axial distinction between the Monarchic/Anglican northwest point of the compass and the Parliamentary/Puritan southeast point of the said compass, both of which antithetical positions, taken in the round, constitute the basis of state-hegemonic/church-subordinate criteria in Britain. Therefore even with greater religious freedom than Anglicanism, Puritanism does not provide a template for religious freedom taken to its logical metaphysical conclusion, being, if anything, merely physical and antichemical in character. There is freedom vis-à-vis Anglicanism, but such freedom parallels the political freedom of Parliament vis-à-vis the Monarchy which, in Britain, is of course constitutional and in no position, therefore, to preclude the relative kind of freedom which typifies the generality of the British people whether as parliamentarians or puritans, parliamentary democrats or democratic theocrats. But, of course, many ordinary British are also Anglicans, even if not all Anglicans are Monarchist rather than Parliamentary. Logically speaking, they should be, though the traditional class structure of British society also compels one to differentiate the Few from the Many largely on a Monarchist/Parliamentary and, correlatively, Anglican/Puritan basis, as between noumenal sensuality/noumenal anti-sensibility and phenomenal sensibility/phenomenal anti-sensuality, whether or not, in practice, many Anglicans ‘of the people’ would not, in their heart of hearts, be more pro-Monarchist than pro-parliamentary. After all, the English Civil War was not exactly a struggle between the Few and the Many, though it can always be portrayed in such terms in the interests of logical expedience. Many Anglicans would have fought for the King and Royals without being in any way of the Few themselves, and such has it always been. Nowadays there may be Anglicans who play football and even Puritans who play Rugby, but one would hesitate to regard football as an Anglican game or rugby as puritan. And yet, in general axial terms, a distinction nevertheless exists, in Britain, between rugby and football which parallels that between Monarchism/Anglicanism at the northwest point of the axial compass and Parliamentarianism/Puritanism at its southeast point, contrasting, as both points must, with anything church-hegemonic/state-subordinate in the Irish Catholic tradition, wherein we are conscious, British imperial influence notwithstanding, of a distinction between hurling and Gaelic football which is indicative not only of the axial and therefore cultural differences between Britain and Ireland (Eire) but of the greater religious freedom which Catholicism enjoys as religious freedom rather than simply, in the Puritan manner, as freedom from Anglican persecution or proscription. Freedom from tyranny smacks much more of democracy, and hence of parliamentarianism/Puritanism, than of religious freedom per se, even if the degree of religious freedom enjoyed by Catholicism still leaves much to be desired from a genuinely metaphysical and, by extrapolation, antimetachemical standpoint such that would be more than just an Eastern, or Buddhist, alternative to Western religious limitations, but the full maturation of religious freedom within an ideological context, necessarily Social Theocratic in character, that was determined to advance religious freedom to a level commensurate with ‘Kingdom Come’ as something genuinely universal and, hence, global. For the next logical stage from a politically sovereign people, as in the Irish Republic, is a religiously sovereign people, and only a people who had some prior sense of religious freedom per se, no matter how imperfect such freedom may be, rather than merely of freedom from autocratic tyranny in both political and religious terms, could be expected to endorse it and to accept the paradoxical terms by means of which it could be brought to pass, terms that, being less democratic/plutocratic than anti-plutocratic/anti-democratic in the male case of antiphysical worldliness and less anti-bureaucratic/anti-meritocratic than meritocratic/bureaucratic in the female case of chemical worldliness presaged, with their pseudo-worldly transmutation under American-type pressures from the northwest point of the axial compass, that more genuine – indeed, that most genuine theocratic/technocratic and, for females, anti-aristocratic/anti-autocratic elevation which we have identified, in previous entries and, indeed, throughout my mature oeuvre (See Opera D’Oeuvre) with salvation and counter-damnation from anti-omega and alpha pseudo-worldly positions to otherworldly and anti-netherworldly positions properly commensurate, in Social Theocracy, with ‘Kingdom Come’, and thus with the lead of Anti-Vanity Fair by the Celestial City in what must become the final stage of noumenal sensibility and noumenal anti-sensuality with the triumph of metaphysical Eternity and antimetachemical Anti-Infinity. But such a triumph could not come to pass without a majority mandate for religious sovereignty in a paradoxical election, or series of elections, which only a people with a traditional sense of religious freedom, like the Irish, could be expected to endorse, and at the expense, needless to say, of provisional political freedoms within a country which was anything but democratic/plutocratic, never mind (in antichemical vein) anti-bureaucratic/anti-meritocratic, in the British manner, and therefore hardly inclined to exaggerate the significance of democracy as an end-in-itself.