I don't think it's an exact balance, do you?
No. I think we lean toward freedom and skirt the edges of the unsafe. Sometimes we fall off. Sometimes we smother. It's a work in progress.
I value safety but with freedom I can create a degree of safety on my own (being free to protect myself and my family).
Yeah, but in the hands of the wrong person that's just a recipe for a very nasty jungle.
Therefore, I believe freedom is a far more important thing to have. I believe God agrees. Which is why He grants us freedom even knowing that we will hurt one another.
Except that freedom came and comes with a host of laws/restrictions and suggestions. Those all go to our betterment, which can be viewed as the ultimate safety concern as well.
God could step in at every moment and prevent us from falling or prevent us from hurting one another but He doesn't. Why not? Because God knows that being free and being our own persons is a far more valuable quality than being safe.
I'll differ with that interpretation and suggest He doesn't because without our ability to make choices our relation would be illusory. That is, if God desires an object upon which to express His nature and part of that nature is love, we're rather what you have to have in play.
Similarly, I believe that a righteous government would place more emphasis on freedom than on making sure we never hurt one another.
Thou shalt not murder...covet...what you do for the least of these...I don't know, Knight. To my mind He seemed and seems mostly concerned (after the matter of salvation) with how we treat one another. The use of freedom to harm is disobedient and contrary to the mercy He extends and extols in practice. So I'd say at best its a wash, that freedom isn't more valued, only integral to being; and that safety, which carries with it our happiness in form and function, is at least the equal of that necessary methodology.
