Self Evident Truths

[MohRokTah]

Self Evident Truths

We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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…

Life. Liberty. Happiness.

We hold these truths to be self evident.

Great words, great ideals, especially when you’re telling a king to stick it up his ass.

We hold these truths to be self evident.

Except for that that part, of course, where those truths weren’t self evident.

Not at all.

The men who wrote that letter to King George may have found certain inalienable rights to be self evident, but they were in the minority. King George III certainly didn’t find those rights to be self evident, nor did his governors in the colonies, nor the nobles of the British Empire, nor did most American colonists for that matter.

It turned out that there was nothing self evident about any of it, as the Founders themselves found out once they’d won their independence and set themselves down to write the Constitution . That lack of evidence is one of the reasons the words in the Constitution are very, very different from those in the Declaration.

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You simply MUST read the rest of this brilliant piece at Stonekettle Station.

[Igel]

1. This again?

Fine. Substitute the synonym and then ponder that it's not gibberish: "We hold these truths to be axiomatic ..."

So, yes, those truths are precisely self-evident because they can't be proven. (If they could be proven, they wouldn't need to be described as self-evident.)

This is precisely the structure of a well-written manifesto. You lay out your assumptions and see what follows. The Declaration of Independence follows. If you have a vision, you lay out the goals you intend to achieve and the principles that they're founded on.

That people had to fight over whether or not they are to be taken as true axioms only stands to reason. Many still do not take them as true: They find that life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness are not reasonable and plausible goals, or fail to assume that governments are properly instituted by people to attain these ends, and make alternate assumptions. Now parallel lines never meet; now parallel lines do meet. You make your assumptions, and the geometry of your social and political structures follows logically, provided that your assumptions don't change (even implicitly, by the redefinition of terms).

The founding fathers knew not only Locke and Latin, but also Euclid. (So if you ever hear a kid in geometry class say, "When am I ever going to use this?" the answer is, "When you read the Declaration of Independence.&quot

[MohRokTah]

2. I think you missed the point. eom