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December 19, 2007
Blogging from the Waffle House!
First time ever I've been able to get a signal! Woo-hoo!
Posted by Carl at 12:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 18, 2007
America is not a democracy.
NPR and one of Sotheby's vice presidents, David Redding, get it wrong: America is not a democracy; no matter what wikipedia might say. (Sotheby's also here.)
"There are new laws and then there are old ones, really old ones: say, the Magna Carta, for example...It's considered one of the most important legal documents in the history of democracy."
(Host, NPR, "All things Considered," December 18, 2007.)
So far, so good. But then:
"In return for their allegiance, the king ceded to the barons various rights. All kinds of ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution owe a debt to the Magna Carta."
(Margot Adler--or here; Show: IBID.)
Hmmm...Maybe that's how Americans gained freedom! We ceded our allegiance in return for rights.
David Redding continues:
"I still believe the most important thing about Magna Carta is it's mythic significance: we can point to a time, we can say this is where freedom and liberty began, this is the antecedent, the progenitor of the great documents of freedom of our country."
(Redding; Show: IBID.)
Let's hope that, considering his accent, NPR merely took what he said out of context; as they do with so many other things. Let's hope Mr. Redding meant "this is where British freedom began." What Mr. Redding said? It agrees not with our own Declaration.
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
(Text here)
Our "separate and equal station," our being "created equal," our "unalienable rights"; , we are given entitlement to these, and they all are derived from"the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God."
He said so himself.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
(Gen 1:1.)
"God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
(Gen. 1:27.)
Even the "atheist" Thomas Paine understood that the "rights" of mankind originally came from God, declaring that we were "originally equals in the order of creation." (Paine, Common Sense, 1776.)
But the Constitution itself denies the lie of democracy, declaring:
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government..."
Can someone please explain for me, then, why these people, and so many other learned people, persist in referring to America as a democracy?
It just ain't so.
Posted by Carl at 09:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 07, 2007
Chesterton Thursdays, VI.
"My complaint of the anti-domestic drift is that it is unintelligent. People do not know what they are doing; because they do not know what they are undoing...People ought to decide in a philosophical fashion whether they desire the traditional social order or not; or if there is any particular alternative to be desired.
As it is they treat the public question merely as a mess or medley of private questions. Even in being anti-domestic they are much too domestic in their test of domesticity. Each family considers only its own case and the result is merely narrow and negative. Each case is an exception to a rule that does not exist.
The family, especially in the modern state, stands in need of considerable correction and reconstruction; most things do in the modern state. But the family mansion should be preserved or destroyed or rebuilt; it should not be allowed to fall to pieces brick by brick because nobody has any historic sense of the object of bricklaying."
Chesterton, The Thing.
Posted by Carl at 12:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack