Something Squeak said got me thinking. America is called the Land or Home of the Free ( I can't remember which at my age
), but this applies to many countries. In what ways are 'we' free? We don't really have freedom of speech, libel and slander laws, not to mention political correctness etc. destroy that.
"Land of the free, home of the brave" is the phrase you're looking for, I believe.
Freedom is not an absolute. It's relative. Freedom is always constrained, either by force or by social convention. However, the degree to which it is constrained varies greatly between countries, periods, and situations. For example, compare a Roman slave working the quarries of Mons Claudianus in Egypt, a "kolkhoznik" in Stalin's Soviet Union, a contemporary Saudi Arabian woman, a Parisian office worker, and a Montanan rancher. I think most people would agree that the Montanan is a lot freer than the Roman slave, even if they might disagree about whether the Parisian is freer than the Montanan, or vice versa.
I believe this is the best way I can answer your question of "in what sense are we free."
Plus where is freedom of speech when Americans can't pray in schools or read the Bible because of so called separation of church and state?
That's not true. Americans are perfectly free to pray in schools, in or out of class. However, schools are not allowed to organize prayers -- for example, a teacher leading the Lord's Prayer in front of class.
Second, there are different restrictions to freedom in different contexts. For example, a pupil is not free to get up and leave class, and you're not free to start singing Waltzing Matilda at the top of your lungs at church during that Lord's Prayer. Moreover, children do not enjoy the same freedoms as adults.
IOW, there are two fallacies in your question: one, the premise is incorrect, and two, it equivocates between restrictions to freedom at school and restrictions to freedom in general. Therefore, I can't answer it.
There are many other examples of where people are not free, so what are your thoughts on the topic of freedom?!
That could fill a bunch of books, actually. I've thought about it a quite a lot. I don't know if anyone would want to read them, though.
In a small nutshell, I believe that a society should be as free as it can be without falling into anarchy. This is necessarily a quite a bit less free than "absolute freedom," because restrictions to freedom -- the social contract -- is what enables cooperation and the benefits of a society.
PS. Why not anarchy? Because it's not a stable system, at least not until we reach a level of production that totally eliminates all scarcity. Every anarchic society larger than a "band" unit to date has pretty quickly devolved into mob or strongman rule. Until someone convincingly demonstrates a way around this, I'm not buying that brand of Kool-Aid.
PPS. If someone brings up medieval Iceland, I would suggest they do a bit of research into how it really worked, rather than the romanticized depictions of anarchist writers. Like, slavery, whoever comes to the Allthing with the biggest group of armed men gets the vote, that sort of thing.