Of course I agree that the Declaration was awesome and groundbreaking.
I wonder, though, if Scalia is right in apparently thinking we are better off on a secular foundation, legally and officially, a foundation that includes all.
Not to mention the fact that if you don’t have the freedom to NOT believe, then believing loses its meaning. It’s no longer a choice, so it’s nothing.
I’m sure this issue is why the wise-guy lawyer brought it up in the Q and A. Scalia knew just what he was getting at.
Wish there was a recording of this meeting. Lots of other good questions, and of course the speech itself.
I wonder, though, if Scalia is right in apparently thinking we are better off on a secular foundation, legally and officially, a foundation that includes all.
Not to mention the fact that if you don’t have the freedom to NOT believe, then believing loses its meaning. It’s no longer a choice, so it’s nothing.
I suspect that Scalia was threading a needle, given his audience, and retained a theistic foundation of Nature Rights.
Just to be clear, you can have freedom to NOT believe in a GOD/Creator, but you can’t deny Mans ability for logic, reason and objective morality.
We can debate where those abilities come from but you must admit that they don’t come from Man.
I’ll just add this before I go.
A two or three year old is constantly asking why.
Why this and that, why why why.
Answering them with, because I said so or because the Bible says so is NEVER satisfying.
Authority lies within.
While Americans might arguably deserve the right not to believe "in" God, their disbelief cannot set aside the actuality of whether there is a God or not. Yet many of their progressive demands are based on an assumption of disbelief in, or fascist suppression of, the reality that there is a creative organizing force vastly beyond our control that has set universes, and the physics and chemistry of their contents, in predictable patterns since time immemorial.
Until 1948, SCOTUS jurishprudence never did away with the implicit understanding that there is a God, and that God both created and can control nature, and that much of Natural Law is observable and deeper levels of it are discoverable.
What we are faced with today is that courts have elevated the social values and intellectual posturing of persons who do not believe that there is a God, or facts, or any form of authority, onto the same social footing as persons who do believe in God. This is fine at a polite dinner party, but it becomes malignant when it champions partial birth abortion, the mutilations of transgender surgery and other modern atrocities being forcefed as gospel to schoolchildren, including the obligation to view one's believing parents and neighbors as ignorant bigots.
Without proof, secularist zealots are winning legal punishments over persons who respect God's creations, such as biological sex. They look at a baby and declare its sex is "assigned", not biologically inherent. Parents have been punished for not wanting to share custody with a divorcing partner who has "discovered" his or her homosexuality, or for not supporting a child's decision to change "genders." So far, the courts have been unwilling to "establish" a standard of truthiness in line with our Declaration.