America’s Strength

     What makes America such a great nation?  Is it that Americans are smarter or stronger than other people?  No.  I believe that America strength lies in the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Yes, it is principles that have made the United States of America great, and if we ever fully abandon those principles, then we will no longer be great.  I pray to God that we return to them, for gradually we have been abandoning those founding principles.

     One of those principles is that certain truths are self-evident.  Currently in America the very idea that there are truths, let alone self-evident ones, is considered quaint by some people.  The fashion now, among our intellectuals, is to take truth statements as merely the opinion of the person making the statements.  Worse yet, some people chalk truth statements up to “perception,” thereby saying, essentially, that they are not true at all.  But we had better get back to self-evident truths, or else full equality will never be realized and people’s rights will no longer be protected–even to the extent that they are now.  The fact that people are equal and have unalienable rights  was considered by Jefferson and the other wise men of the Continental Congress a self-evident truth.

     According to the Declaration of Independence human beings are inherently and intrinsically equal.  It was an ideal that was not realized for a long time.  Some say it still has not been realized.  However, we would not even have the measure of equality that we have now in the United States had our Founding Fathers not codified human equality into the Declaration of Independence as one of the self-evident truths.  Women and racial minorities have based their just fights for equality on this principle in the Declaration.  Otherwise, they sould simply be demanding rights solely on the basis that they want them, and that would have been no reason, in and of itself, for them to have them.  (Nor would white men have any basis for their rights.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Another principle that makes America strong is our belief in God.  The Founding Fathers said that people “are endowed by their Creator” with rights.  They did not say that people have those rights just because they say so; we have rights because God gave them to us.  No person and no government should deny or abridge those rights, because to do so is to defy God Himself.  You are free not to believe in God, but once you do, I wonder what you will base the existence of human rights on.  The men who signed the Declaration believed in “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” and the “Supreme Judge.”  We would be wise to follow them.

     I could go on, but I will end with a mention of one other principle, which is the self-evident truth that human rights come before governmental authority.  Our Founders said that the purpose of government is to secure our rights.  So often these days, governmental bodies act as though it is they who gave us our rights and they who determine the extent of those rights.  It is the other way around, according to the Declaration; humans naturally have rights, and the government, that is the folks in charge, have only the powers that we yield to them–and only to the extent that we allow.  The exact wording:  “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, . . .”

     So there you have it.  First comes God, then human equality, then human rights, then government by consent of the governed.  What do you say we return to that order and to those great principles that have made the United States the envy of he world and the newfound homeland of many an oppressed person?

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