[r9etb]

More like it creates the legal framework whereby you can defend your natural-law rights without having to go to "war," in the Lockean sense, each and every time your rights are trespassed. Suggesting anything man-made "creates" rights is simply dangerous in any context. What man creates, man can take away. What God creates, no man can take away.

Excellent.

The other side of it is that to maintain a fixed standard of order, a government can be "limited" only to the extent that people are willing and able to constrain their own actions. John Adams's comment on the Constitution being intended for a "moral and religious people" reflects this realization.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

John Adams's comment on the Constitution being intended for a "moral and religious people" reflects this realization.

It works no other way, my friend---as we've seen to our detriment.