I believe in those truths, but I don’t think they’re self evident. Some people think it’s self-evident that everyone has a right to a house or a job or whatever, which is just wrong. So the notion of self evidence is good in a rhetorical way, and it works when everyone agrees that the thing that’s claimed to be self evident is self evident, but it really kind of holds itself up by its own bootstraps and so isn’t exactly an immovable anchor.
True it’s human nature to seek the truth, but it’s also human nature be wrong about stuff. If the truth is to prevail and persist, it takes more than just letting people seek the truth. The truth has to be expounded and defended against untruth and it has to be pitched and sold and ingrained into people. Otherwise they’ll just wind up believing silly things. The fact that Barak Obama is president proves this.
Calvin Coolidge got it right in a great speech that he gave on the Fourth back in 1926:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2546810/posts
“””No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.”””
He says that if “we are to MAINTAIN the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it.....We must CULTIVATE the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. WE must KEEP REPLENISHED...”
Our principles are great and true, but we can’t rely on the notion that they’re self evident to maintain them. Instead we have to do the hard work of maintaining/cultivating/replenishing them. This is hard work, and especially hard for a pluralistic nation with a million things going on, but it has to be done by every generation. We can’t be casual about it or rest on our laurels or we’ll lose them.
The issue I see, is that many are simply not asking the right questions. When they start asking the right questions, they become liberated within their mind at first, and then in their actions and life pursuits.
It is no ones business to know or control what I am thinking.
I am FREE.
This IS self-evident and we are all born with it.
The "We" in the statement does not apply to broad humanity, it applies to the men with courage enough to sign their names to it, pledging (and for many, forfeiting) lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in following it. "Self-evident" does not mean popping up in unclad beauty like Aphrodite, it means that the system described employs them as foundational premises, axioms if you want to describe the thing in terms that Jefferson did not use. It means that the conclusion, that the current government ought to be dissolved and a new one instituted, follows from the premises that (1) men have the freedom to do it, and (2) governments are formed from consent that may be withdrawn.
It's really no harder than that. The reader remains free to believe whatever he or she desires; the men who signed it did believe it. And that's why they acted as they did. And the reason Jefferson wrote it was to tell the former government why they'd been fired.
Debating the thing on the soundness of its axioms as general philosophical principles is a fine exercise in schoolboy logic but it's a little beside the point. This is, after all, rhetoric and not logic, and there is a real reason that the Greeks separated the two. Moreover, existential correctitude won't stop a bullet, or a hanging, and these men were staring at both.
But since we're indulging ourselves in this sort of amusement, I might point out that it is not the rights themselves, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that are self-evident according to a strict reading of the text. What its signators signed onto as "self-evident" was that a Creator endowed men with rights and that those were among the ones the Creator endowed. Those rights, according to this interpretation, do not hang in space on their own, they exist on the authority of God and therefore are not, in and of themselves, self-evident at all. It is the existence of God as authority in the matter that was, to these men, self-evident. (That is, in my opinion, one of the stronger arguments for God's existence if one must attempt to derive that from logic). One who does not believe that probably shouldn't sign the Declaration of Independence. And if anyone did, he's beyond chiding for it now.