Benj,
I realize that Thomas Paine was purely secular, and that made him somewhat of an outsider; because the remaining founders, and the American people were religious; and they saw the wisdom of having a Divine source for human right and for human equality before the law.
The Declaration of Independence is most interesting to me because it combines purely rational ideas of the scientific enlightenment alongside Judeo-Christian religious ideas regarding the value of human life. The idea that all men are self-evidently equal is purely rational – you don’t have to be religious to see the self-evident truth of it; but it was combined with the religious notion that we are made equal by an equalizing Creator – hybridization.
The idea of our essential human rights and equality before the law as deriving from the Creator is Judeo-Christian in origin. It dates back to Thomas Aquinas, and probably back even further in the Torah. John Locke was the man who resurrected (pardon the pun) this religious idea during the Enlightenment.
“…by his order and about his business, they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s….The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…“ John Locke
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
The idea of just government power deriving from the consent of the governed is purely rational – it is not religious as far as I can tell – and I love this secular rational idea of our founders; I bet Thomas Paine had a hand in it; and I thank him for it even though I’m religious. The Constitution too is purely secular, and I am thankful for that too; but even the author of the Constitution saw a Divine hand between the lines. In my mind this hybridization of the best of the secular plus the best of the religious is what makes America great, and it makes us different from Europe, and it makes us Exceptional.
“It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it [the Constitution] a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” James Madison
I’ll read up on Woody Holton while you read up on Garet Garett.
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them….. In the welfare state the government undertakes to see to it that the individual shall be housed and clothed and fed according to a statistical social standard, and that he shall be properly employed and entertained, and in consideration for this security the individual accepts in place of entire freedom a status and a number and submits his life to be minded and directed by an all-responsible government.” Garet Garett
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/garrett1.html
