Our Founding Fathers were adamant that all people, all Americans, had certain inalienable and unalterable rights that came directly from our Creator, not the government. In our Declaration of Independence, this was specified. The words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” leave no question as to their recognition of certain rights and their unwillingness to accept less. Why should we be any different today in America?
Those incredibly wise and detailed men continued saying, “…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is astounding to me that some in politics today believe that government has the right to trample, suspend, or modify those rights. THEY DO NOT!
The government has no right to tell any American citizen what they can think or even what they can say. The only caveat is that if what we are saying is inciting riots and inducing sedition thereby endangering our Republic and our people the government can and should intervene. Intervention is a difficult assertion because it can only mean keeping the public safe not developing a politically correct thought and speech police force. If anyone becomes a threat to others, they are impeding that person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The government that our Founders established was intended to always be recognized as ‘by the consent of the governed’ not ‘vice versa’. The government exists and operates, with the consent of the governed. We are the ones charged with the oversight of the government, not the government charged with the oversight of us. That is what the federal government has morphed into and poses a serious threat against our liberty and our designed system of government.
Politicians, of all stripes, seem to have developed or adopted the idea that they are our overseers and in the words of some, “the guardians of our democracy.” The fallacy in that view is, in part, so few seem to understand that we are not a ‘direct democracy’ but a ‘republic’ with a representative government. A second, fallacy in that line of thought is that the elected politicians seem to think that they are our lords and ladies. They are not! They are elected to represent us not rule us.
One of the roots of the development of this type of thinking is found in our modern educational system where Civics, Government, and History are taught incorrectly and inadequately if at all. I have discussed our system of government with people holding Ph.D.’s in history. Some of them teach in our universities and do not understand our system of government. Let me rephrase that and say, they may understand, but disagree with it and believe it antiquated. Their disagreement leads them to become members of the Cancel Culture and Revisionist seeking to sanitize history to their liking.
Historic sanitization only results in the lesser informed being bereft of the benefit of the awareness and lessons in the failures and successes of our forefathers. America like every other nation has made mistakes and has skeletons in our closet. History should be taught as it is, not sanitized reinvented, or rewritten to fit a political or ideological narrative. It is what it is and what it is should be our schoolmaster to help us avoid the mistakes and build upon the successes.
Our Founding Fathers offered the vision of a republic where all people were recognized as being created in the image of God and endowed with inalienable rights. Every person has the God-given right, a right to be protected by our Constitution, to enjoy Life, Liberty, and the freedom to pursue happiness without government infringement. That speaks of limited government, not the all-powerful nanny state that is being advanced in today’s political circles.
Somehow, we have adopted the erroneous view that there must be a complete separation of ‘church and state.’ That view expanded requires a complete separation of moral moorings and moral absolutes from the political. The desire to silence those who teach and preach the Gospel and the precepts and principles of the Bible relegating them to the confines of the four walls of the church is misguided. That is not what transpired during our formative years and should not now. The 19th-century Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, in his work Politics, Law, and Morality wrote: “A complete separation of morality and politics constitutes one of the prevalent errors and evils of our century.” That is still true today in the 21st-century. It is a universal truth that is timeless.
The American nation was based on the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God. I use that archaic English term coined by clergyman Richard Hooker in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593). Thomas Jefferson in his declaration, “in the Course of human Events, it [became] necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands [with an oppressive government] which have connected them [to each other] and assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle[d] them.”
Joseph Ellis explained in his book The Character of Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson, linked American Independence to grand and great forces that transcended the immediate political crisis and swept the imagination upward toward a purer and more principled world.” We need that today. We need a return to our moral moorings and a recognition of God’s sovereignty and His bestowal of inalienable rights on mankind.
The right to Life is darkened and tainted in the pro-abortion view. We claim that everyone has the Right to Life but when it comes to the unborn, their right to live is subordinated to the right of the mother to opt for ending that life. The juridical parting point is how life is defined by pro-abortion advocates and justices. The term life is semantically poor. The Romans did little but Latinize various Greek terms for life.
Bios: life, in as much as a being, is born and dies in its precariousness and morality. Zoe: eternal life, which has no beginning and no end. It is a dimension of life that is different from bios, such as divine life. Psyche: life in motion or movement and is more than bios because it brings things like character into the mix. Soma: a dimension of life that is inseparable from bios, but which is not reducible to the soma; it can be translated as a body. Words have meaning. Life is the ability to Live and pursue that which makes us complete in every dimension. That is God-given Right!
Liberty is more than not being in chains it is the freedom to think, express, develop ideas, dreams, and plans for the pursuit of Life. Liberty includes freedom from overt and covert governmental infringement upon our ability to live the life that God has granted us. God gave us liberty and through His Truth, we are liberated. It is through educational and historic ignorance that our chains are forged, and we are imprisoned by the tyrannical. It is expressed in censorship and deprogramming of anyone not agreeing with the mandated ideological philosophy. That strips citizens of the Freedom of Speech and Opinion. It seeks to make us mindless followers rather than innovators and initiators.
It is stated possibly erroneously that Jefferson changed the third term of John Locke’s trinity “life, liberty, and property” with “the pursuit of happiness.” That phrase may have been an importation, not an origination by Jefferson. Our Founding Fathers believed that “pursuing happiness was the foundation of liberty.” Our founders adamantly sought to protect private property from government infringement.
Our Founders believed that God has given to every person the right, the undeniable and inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Unless we return to those founding principles, we will watch our republic become a memory and our liberties become controlled and restricted by the government. I continue to trust God, not the Government.
God bless you and God bless America!
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