There is no Freedom without the Law.

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If there weren't any laws, I wouldn't feel free to walk outside even in broad daylight. I wouldn't be free to cross the street unless I was very suicidal. I wouldn't be free in my own home. I'd probably be free to take whatever I wanted in a store without paying for it, but the stores would probably be empty because everyone else got to it first. Anyone could just walk right in and assault or murder me, or completely destroy my apartment and take whatever they thought was nice enough to steal.

So I think since I'm law-abiding I have more freedom, but no one is completely free. Especially people who are in jail for stealing and murdering and committing arson and drunk driving and drug dealing and abuse and...

I actually don't see anything ominous about the linked article in the original post. They used a reference to the Levitical laws in reference to the topic of laws, as a kind of law, and they did it briefly at that. It's a set of cultural laws practiced under Judaism, it's at least indirectly or partially related to the way we've come to practice our particular strain of humanism in the west (and equally it's heavily indebted to the concepts of key Greek and Roman philosophers) so there's nothing insane or inherently fundamentalist about bringing it up in that context.

I'm going to suggest something and it may or may not be controversial, I think it's just more likely that we tend not to talk like this and in that respect I'm going to say something particularly astringent. The idea of true 'freedom' is as vacuous as free will. More than likely we're living in a full-determinist rubric so the thing is a whole-cloth fiction.

What I think people are getting at when they talk about freedom is the rights to options that cause minimal friction to their fundamental decency. Then again we've dialed in on the traits that we want to enforce for having a better society. You're absolutely free, in a sense, to do anything at all, just that you're equally bound to the consequences of those actions, as well as the social and economic contracts that you break, which colloquially at least the right to rake in consequences we tend not to define as a freedom but like to (I think somewhat erroneously) refer to the consequences themselves as the limits of our freedom. We're also free to blow our political, legal, and economic systems up and debate what regions of the US would turn toward which type of dictatorship.

All of that said there's technically no freedom with law or without law. It's just that, with law done right, you have a pretty good chance of living in a decidedly better society when compared to the alternatives if you're calculating better on some combination of the least human suffering meeting the least destruction and secondary/tertiary effects on the settings and debts to future generations possible. Strangely freedom and less suffering aren't necessarily the same thing. When freedom means liberal government that also doesn't mean freedom, it just means a set of rules that the majority will be able to navigate and comply with to the most measured and mitigatable degrees of coercion whereas in a dictatorship there's one domineering set of rules that might fit some fine and crush the life out of just as many people and it's largely that lack of ability for each person to pick the basket of costs and benefits that best suit them that we call tyranny as opposed to freedom.

I don't know that many people will find this post satisfying, it's me crafting non-shiny things again, but it seems like it would have to be the most likely scenario to be true.

I think freedom is irrelevant to human existence. It is an idea that distracts from that which is relevant.

The way I understand law is that it is more than the collective values of a public (regarding consequences for things like murder). Law is rooted in the religious attribution of rights that exceed those of human beings to a unitary governing body.

Direct democratic determination of collective response seems to me like an absolutely valid mode of operation, while the expression of that collective response is also direct. It is through the disconnecting of determination and expression from the public - by republic representation - that throwing away individual integrity becomes acceptable in societies.

If one member of a community goes on a child-raping spree, it is useful to that community for any individuals within that community who think that behavior is abhorrent to do whatever they see fit to stop that behavior. It is also useful to that community for any individuals who think that behavior is acceptable to defend it in whatever way they see fit. Through this form of direct responsibility to the community you are a part of, the values of individuals will not only necessarily align with the values of their neighbors - either through eradication of minority value systems, eradication of majority value systems, or negotiation between value systems resulting in homogenization - but will also be explored to much greater extents by the individuals themselves, as the behavioral decisions related to their value systems are realistically applicable and experienced.

What is important to avoid is surrogating the expression of individual values through avoidant submission to a perceived "higher power" such as a government or god.

Through interconnected diversity and processes of selection comes strength.