"Do as you please" is a theme for "modern" times. We live in an age where nearly anything goes. Not everything, for each generation draws a line somewhere between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. Nobody today would turn a hair today at a widow marrying her dead husband's brother or a woman being elected to parliament, unheard of in nineteenth century Britain, but nobody a hundred years ago would have turned a hair at smoking in a café or teachers caning disobedient children. Nevertheless we think of ourselves as free, and cherish the gift of freedom.
Freedom is part of the Christian message. Jesus came to set us free - free from the slavery of sin, free from the slavery of the old law which had been given to Moses. No longer would an injured person call for vengeance, eye for eye and tooth for tooth. No longer would a simple act of kindness - cooking a meal for a starving stranger on a Saturday, handing a cup of water to a leper - be an action that no "righteous" person would do. Righteousness now came from trust in God, in acting as God would act. And because God is love, righteousness meant showing love: loving God with heart, mind, soul and strength, and loving our neighbour as we love ourself.
St Augustine summarized the freedom of the Gospel in the pithy sentence "Love, and do what you will" (it sounds even pithier in Latin: ama et quod vis fac.) But there have always been misguided people who have forgotten the first word, and assumed that they can do whatever they please.
No society could work this way, and a sensible non-Christian might put it more reasonably, by saying that we can do as we like, as long as we don't harm anyone else. Sometimes, to meet reason with reason, it is possible to debate what "harming someone else" means. Is an unborn child "someone else" or merely a part of its mother's body? Is assisted suicide "harmful" if the person asks for our help in achieving their death?
Doing no harm is a long way from loving, though. And we are called to love not only our neighbours but ourselves as well. If our neighbours have worth in God's sight, they should also have worth in our own estimation.
This is why Christians and humanists have difficulty understanding each other's viewpoint. We will have different responses to the suicide who believes life is "not worth living". We will have different responses to the parents who believe their unborn child is "not worth having". We will have different responses to the couple who believe their relationship is "not worth preserving". And we will look differently at the consequences of people's actions: is drug-addiction merely anti-social: an encouragement to dealers and a drain on the health services, or does it reduce the addict's openness to God's power and goodness? If we wish to end our life, is it enough just to make sure we are unlikely to change our mind, or should we consider how others will be affected by our death?
Although we all know where babies come from, Christians share the additional belief that God "formed us in our mother's womb" - we belong to God. This belief is why there is such an intense dislike of eugenics, and an almost irrational distrust of stem-cell research. We do not want to breed Übermenschen, and as Christians, we should not "play God" in deciding that a baby likely to be born handicapped should not be allowed to live - for if blindness, or Down's syndrome, or muscular dystophy is a handicap, who is to say that left-handedness, or a predisposition to criticize the government, are not handicaps too? Because we all belong to God, we all have value and we all deserve to be valued. And this is why we should all value our neighbours, not simply avoiding harming them, but actively seeking their good.
This is true of ourselves too. Not only should we seek the good of others, but at the same time, we should seek what is good for ourselves - what is good for our spiritual well-being, though. Those deadly sins - getting rich, living luxuriously, showing we are better than others, getting our own way, living for food or for sexual gratification, living in an idle dream world may seem attractive, but if these become our goals in life, they will enslave us and spell death to our chances of growing in God's liberating image.
We pray "your will be done", and our pleasure should be in doing God's will. We need to constantly see God in others, and also to see God at work in ourselves. If we truly see our neighbours as individuals to be respected and cherished, then, and only then, will we be able to "do as we please", and only then will God's will be done.
HD