A man may choose which ideas he is going to believe, but he is not free to choose the consequences of his choice. Life is something like those little books that children read where they come to a place where they make a choice and then are directed to a page where the story proceeds according to the choice they made.

That's why man's misery is so great, as Solomon put it. Ec 8:6 "Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man [is] great upon him." The consequences of our choices reveal the nature of our purposes, and because man's natural purposes are sinful, when the time and judgment arises man's misery of great.

A man may choose to believe that men are naturaly good. He will then conclude that man must be free to live his life according to his good impulses. The experiment will fail, as it has for the last two or three generation of Dr. Spock America. The public school system, based upon that desperately rosy and unrealistic expectation of human nature, is an unmitigated disaster, and everyone knows it, except the teacher's union and politicians bought and paid for by the union.

But people hold to their delusions, as Solomon again put it: Pr 17:12 "Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly." People don't mind being wrong, but they hate to have their folly exposed. A man may play the fool, but he hates to have it pointed out. A man's ideas are so dear to him that the anger of a mother bear is safer than his.

Augustine had the grace and character to write his Retractions near the end of his life. Unfortunately, Rousseau and Dewey and other fathers of liberal thought did not live long enough to see the unmitigated disaster their ideas have wrought. But they will know at the Day of Judgment.

Ideas have consequences and men have no choice in the matter of consequences.