Reply #88: back off from your literalism and it'll be easier to understand

[dusmcj]

IMO we cannot avoid confronting the centrality of the phrase "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights". I personally am not interested in what the absolute mechanism is which guarantees those rights, what I am interested in is the notion that they are inherent, and cannot be granted or taken away by any fellow human. Denied, yes. Made to not exist, no.

We waste our time if we are atheists or strict separationists tripping over whether the Founders came from a Christian context or not: OF COURSE THEY DID, as did all Europeans of their time. Franklin was purportedly the furthest from orthodox Christianity of the time, with his Quaker notion of "powerful goodness", but they were all people for whom God and religion were a significant part of life, in a time when this was true for all their peers as well. All they said about religion was that government should have no part in its establishment or advocacy. They argue from the other, philosophical, vantage point however when they say that government in turn has no say in the existence of individual rights which are not conferred or conferrable by any human entity. The Founders' religiosity is on the one hand a given, and on the other does not detract from their secular architecture in the least. Note also that as products of their time, the new notion that all men are created equal had not yet spread, as you observe, to classes of creatures who were not considered 'men', including the propertyless, women, and slaves. So that we might conclude that they had not driven their philosophical formulation to its logical conclusion; nevertheless, this again does not detract from that which they did achieve.

In this time when we are no longer an allegedly homogenous assemblage of western Europeans professing one Christian creed or another, we need to consider how to bring the Founders' notion of inherency forward to the present day, and make it operative in the absence of a traditional omniscient deity. We can note that other major philosophical traditions do not rely centrally on a deity, but rather on an ethical code built by sages so devoted to seeking enlightenment that they are revered as sacred beings for their lifelong efforts (please let's not argue Buddhist minutiae or sect differences, gentle reader, I think this is a fair summary) - they are held in awe, but for their very human efforts, not for having become divine. So that if the need for a supernatural entity to whom we are to surrender our autonomy makes you squeamish, I offer you historically validated alternative philosophical structures which do not require what you might dismiss as hocus-pocus, but instead focus on the notion that man himself can approach perfection (and let's not be squeamish about that), or at the least succeed in efforts to improve the common weal. These traditions also posit the notions of inherent rights, and inherent rightness and wrongness; it may be situational and change from instance to instance (or it may not), but it has nothing to do with human opinions nor does it rely for its truth-state on an agreement between people: it simply is, and whether we agree or not matters not one iota. This is a fundamental underpinning of ethics, it would seem: that they do not rely on our opinion of them for their rightness.

If we dispose of absoluta and reduce all questions to a social negotiation where one outcome is ultimately as acceptable as the other, because all opinions must be considered equally valid, since the first priority is that all questions are decided by agreement between parties, then we consign ourselves to a relativist dimension where no "truth" is possible, because it can all be argued one way or another, depending on moon phase, day of the week, or more commonly, who has the biggest mouth. So that hence, we can in fact argue over whether the sky is blue. When, I might note, it is not up for discussion. Since blue is a signifier denoting certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation (light), and it is provable via objective means not involving anyone's opinion that the light reaching our eyes from a clear sky is in fact of that frequency. When we reduce everything to a conversation among men about their opinions, we open the door for that very conservative mode that proclaims by its actions that de facto, whoever has the most material power will be found to be right. If you've ever sat in a business meeting where a gasbag who didn't know his ass from a hole in the wall was setting the tone and determining the outcome of the meeting for all involved, including persons far better equipped to set policy, you may have an instinctive understanding of what I mean here. It's the PNAC notion that the content of a policy platform is far less important than the vigor with which it's presented...

A nice summation might be:

Things either are, or are not, or we don't know.
Whether we know or not has no effect on whether they are or not.

We little humans have a dangerous flaw of wanting to think that we are important or not, and that particularly, what we think is significant beyond the confines of our brainpans. Every now and then, nature provides us with a tap on the shoulder, that feels like an earthquake to us, to remind us that we are not. But these seemingly need to come more frequently...