[Leica] Re: Armed America

[pj at GoodPhotos.com (Michael Eric Berube)]

Douglas Sharp wrote:
> 3 captions out of 22 photos mention god or their creator as the source of 
> their 
> rights - a scary proportion to me.


I honestly don't understand all this fear that so many people feel when the 
law abiding adults in a society are not treated like children to a 
paternalist State.

The united States of America were founded as a Nation upon the very bedrock 
of the proposition that Individuals have Rights that are theirs by Divine 
providence and that anything that can be called a Right is specifically NOT 
given to us by the State or any other Earthly source (King, Prince, 
Potentate, Collective, Parliament or Knesset.)

Their notion of what constituted 'God' varied quite a bit as well, so
they used the word "Creator" in the Declaration as in "...That to secure 
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just 
powers from the consent of the governed..." and they do not mention Deity
at all in the Constitution or it's Amendments which were supposed to
/Guarantee/ our Rights (not /provide/ them to us.)

The Declaration was a wonderfully uncompromising document that stated the 
facts of the abuses that Parliament and King were laying on the colonists 
pretty clearly and it made a great promise of hope for the future of 
Self-Governance in the world. (An alien concept to history at the 
time...and only even a dream since.)
The legally binding U.S. Constitution that followed a few years later 
however, was a sad compromise of these principles that left out most of the 
population in these United States at the time (women, slaves and Indians) 
and the Amendments have been (sometimes) trying to correct those 
compromises ever since.

The question of from whence we derive our Rights may seem a minor play of 
semantics to most people, but the misunderstanding even in the States that 
the Constitution (ie the Government) and not Deity/Nature, Nature's 
Providence GIVES us our Rights is at the very root of much of what is wrong 
with our nation and our nation's meddlesome actions abroad.

Consider if you will that if it is the Government which that GIVES us our
Rights then Government can easily take what it has given away without 
recourse as a matter of law (without due process) and we get the insane 
notion that Individual Rights only apply to 'citizens' of our nation and 
only within our borders.  I submit that it is this far 'scarier' line of 
thought that leads to such disgraces as the Guantanamo Bay
enslavement facility and most of the international conflicts that our
nation has had it's sticky little fingers in in the last 230 or so years.

-- 
Carpe lumen,
Michael Eric B?rub?
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