This is what I'd like to say to my son about religion, morality and freedom of choice:
religion and its commandments, strictures, etc. do limit your 'choice' in a certain way.
But they also prepare you for a very important choice further (or quite close for some of us) down the line.

Think of it in this way: imagine you're playing a strategic computer game. On the one hand it's fun to be able to make all possible mistakes, explore all the available paths, make all - even the most extreme - mistakes. On the other hand, what if there's a time limit. Would you reject tips from someone who's gone through all the levels. Not detailed instructions - there would be still room for experimenting, mistakes or individual approach. But the kind of tips that could save you precious minutes and points right at the end where you'd be getting behind time probably.
Now imagine that you're told that you're playing for your life. Would you then reject the tips for the sake of some experiences, explorations that could not only prove useless, boring or hurting - both you and others - but also cost you the ultimate price.

The repentant villain on the cross .... (he must have prepared to ask Jesus what he did)

Worn out English

'It's absolutely seriously delicious!', I've just heard. This is the kind of English - and kind of the English - I detest. The result of overuse and absuse of the language; the exhaustion that leads to such artificial contraptions, where one good word 'tasty' or 'nice', perhaps with an addition of 'very' doesn't work any more, because it has been worn out on stupid, trivial and empty things and situations.

Where Have All The Bright Boys Gone?

I imagined today some men I know - friends, acquantances or people I heard of or saw once or two - that have ended up in some kind of mess (but then, you may ask, who does not?), a kind of obvious, conspicuous mess: debt, drink, broken marriage and family, drugs. And many of them can at times be bright, compassionate, reasonable, loving.

Where did all go wrong? Why did their weaknesses got the upper hand in their lives?

Then I imagined them as altar boys, who come back home after the Sunday mass and - sometimes bored, but at other times genuinely interested and intrigued - listen to their old respecatble uncle (who's a former soldier and now a parish council member) who tells them old stories with a moral; they roll their eyes up when their mother reprimands them about their table manners, but they noticed that the girls at school notice their good and cultivated behaviour.

There is also a sense of guilt and discomfort when they breach the rules that their relatives, family friends and priests preach (rules that many of the 'preachers' break themselves - the boys know), but decades later they may have been grateful for instilling in them such feelings....

But it is a past that wasn't. They sit now lonely in a cheap rented room, far away from their families, drink - between three of them - a second bottle of vodka before 1pm and between the jokes, old stories get glimses of the past and present that could be and is not.