Posted on 07/04/2010 7:03:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
To justify treason against the Crown.
The Declaration, Perry reminds us, was an ex post facto justification of American beliefs. It was addressed to educated elite opinion, especially abroad; it was designed to win arguments, not to capture the essence of Americanism as Americans themselves already understood it.
I think what our founders were saying about inalienable rights being self-evident, is that through the centuries they were being ignored. This was the first time that a country actually put them in writing so that a nation could be formed around those ideals.
Only Huck would take time away from p!ssing on our Constitution to do the same to our Declaration on Independence Day.
It is of no importance whether any one particular person or group of persons believe the "truths" to be "self evident". The Declaration states "WE hold these truths ..." (emphasis on WE).
In other words - the signatories to the Delcaration were stating quite clearly that THEY believed that the truths were unable to be contradicted and thus, for them, something worth fighting for!
Most people forget what the Declaration really was - it was the justification of the signatories as to WHY they sought independence from England - in hopes that other nations (mostly France) would come to thier aid.
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.
But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.
Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.
Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. - Frederic Bastiat 1801-1850
So, according to you, not only were Washington, Jay, Hamilton, Madison, etc, rogues and liars, but all of the brave men who signed their possible death warrant in July 1776 as well.
Why are you complaining about Washington, not Jefferson - since Jefferson wrote the Declaration and owned slaves until he died?
"That has nothing to do with what I'm saying."
It is interesting to me that you don't dispute Jacquerie's accusation that you are using a "leftist non-argument". You don't deny it's a leftist opinion at all. You simply say "That has nothing to do with what I'm saying".
No.
I dismissed it out of hand.
So let me ask you this:
Did you wake up this morning and say, “Hey, it’s Independence Day! I think I’ll go on FR and badmouth the Founding Fathers!” Why don’t you go burn a flag while you’re at it.
I think that the intent of people doing this is not to try and understand our Founders but to tear our country apart by tearing apart the Constitution and the DoI and the Founding Fathers. No matter what they say, it does not change the fact that the Constitution and the DoI is there and will stay there. Their comments won’t change that.
Have Huck go to a local Rodeo and burn a flag. Then watch what happens. Huck, I’m sure, has seen Cowboy and Indian wars, I doubt he has see Cowboy and Flag Burner wars.
Thanks for the very nicely stated correction to a basic premise of my statement. You are right, of course.
However.
If the truths "WE hold" are not self-evident to a majority of voters in a democracy (or even a Republic such as we are in the process of transitioning away from), then it's inevitable that the freedoms we've enjoyed under our Constitution will pass away.
In my estimation, I always thought it meant it was obvious to anyone with a calibrated moral compass and some common sense, that the "truths" were a simple judgement of knowing right vs. wrong. It's not rocket science, political correctness, or word-parsing propoganda that is self-evident; it's common sense.
Because their arguments couldn't work unless they claimed it.
Just to be clear: the claim of self-evidence was not applied to the rights themselves, but the fact that they were granted by a Creator.
This is a very important point: those principles held out as unalienable rights, cannot be derived from first principles, nor from observation of the natural world.
In many or most respects, among humans or among any other combination of species, the world seems to operate very nicely on a principle of Might Makes Right.
So how does one arrive at the opposite pole that people, individually, have rights? One invokes a Creator Who makes a rule like that. (As it happens, I believe this to be true.)
Ayn Rand's philosophy collapses on this point, in that she attempted to derive the unalienable rights apart from a creator; but she failed. In effect, she was forced to put herself, and her own assertions, into the same Creator role that she had so stridently rejected.
The bottom line, though, is that those unalienable rights don't simply spring up like laws of nature. They have to come from somewhere -- to be asserted.
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