Norwich Meeting - "What is Freedom?" - Sunday 14th June

[Mark Barrett]

Dear All

We have now set a date for the much awaited follow up to the first
What is Freedom meeting held in March.

The gathering will take place on Sunday14th June at 1.30pm at
Chapelfields Mosque, Norwich. Full address at the bottom of this
message.

The question we will consider is "What is a Free Human Being?"

We hope you will join us and help spread the word. We're keen to make
links with the non-Muslim community, and any assistance here will be
most appreciated.

More info below and on FB at: https://www.facebook.com/events/685998901545153/

Cheers

Mark Barrett
0785 439 0408

This meeting follows the first "What is Freedom?" meeting held in March.

Here are some of the main points coming out of the first meeting:

1) Freedom is a social phenomenon. Individual freedom as sold to us by
modernity is a red herring. This false freedom suits hierarchies,
elites, powers (the state and corporate approach in both its narrow
and widest global sense).

2) This modern approach is both an attack on nature and a form of
imperialism. Its logic is to compete with, divide, conquer, control,
use, exploit and accumulate material benefit, resource and power from
'the other' (hence national and global corporate state entities). At
the same time, it is infectious in that it pushes everyone to pursue
the same logic.

3) Thus the masses have been internally and externally colonised and
controlled by the same, linked social, political and economic
structures. Following Goethe, we are being cleverly convinced of a
liberation while in fact the opposite is true.

4) The power of industrial technological development plays a big,
possibly central part in this control and sleight of hand, due to its
manifest power in the world and its effect on human reality and the
overall political/economic context. We are thus enslaved by what
amounts to a machine-like, artificial monster (of our own making).

5) In contrast, we need a counter-cultural liberation which is
organic, non-ideological and human community-led. A bottom up approach
with conviviality and collaboration between individuals and
communities locally and elsewhere at its heart.

6) Accepting our lack of freedom is a starting point.

7) We should take the opportunity presented in the momentum, goodwill
and kind offer of the space at the mosque to develop a 'group feeling'

8) The question of human freedom cannot be separated from the linked
question of what it means to be a human being, since a true human
being is both free and able to develop authentically only in the
context of a genuine community.

9) The next What is Freedom meeting should be around the concept of
what it means to be a (free) human being.

We hope you will join us on Sunday 14th June.

Sunday 14th June 1.30pm
What is a Free Human Being?
Ihsan Mosque, 17 Chapelfield East
Norwich
NR2 1SF