I can only postulate, but reading over the journals and letters of the founding fathers gives me the impression that the divine source is intended to take the control or say-so away from humans. It's kind of a bait and switch, libertarian style. It implies that our rights and freedoms are not something granted by government, but by something higher than humanity which humans do not control. It is faith in that higher guidance, combined with historical knowledge of Britain's oppression, that made America what it is.
In actual practice humans can do whatever they feel like doing, including seize power and become fascists; but because the founders were also philosophers, they knew that an idea cannot be destroyed. Therefore, if humans act against freedom and liberty, the notion will again arise that they have no right to do so, because might does not determine right. Humans are divinely empowered, in the natural order, to live free, and any humans who work against that will be stopped.
It's not necessarily about Christianity, but one must acknowledge divinity for this to work. Simply modernizing it to refer to our DNA is insufficient. After all, every human shares more or less the same DNA, yet our behaviors and plans for ourselves and companions are different. The Constitution has a divine foundation, which is why I always tell people that freedom and liberty are spiritual values. Our Constitution makes
spiritual assertions behind the wording.
Our economy, our faith in money, is also spiritual. Yet people deny this spirituality every day, mostly because when they hear the word "spiritual" they think "God or religion" and stop listening. But spirituality, at its core, is about connection, and the Constitution is about human connection to other humans.
The reason why our country is facing a dark time is because our people, first and foremost, have lost loyalty to one another. If we still had solidarity our government would not be this out of control. We forgot the spiritual intent behind the foundation. Without that objective determination, anyone can morph the rules to mean whatever they please, or ignore them completely. The spiritual core is gone. And atheists are not to blame, plenty of hypocritical religious people have also joined the hate-your-fellow-human party.
The spiritual core of human connection has always been there, but as soon as Americans started to forget, our government started to become corrupt and began doing exactly what governments in their nature do: usurp freedom and liberty.
I have no idea if this thread is in the right place, but oh well.
Anybody who has stuck around for more than 30 seconds of a discussion of Constitutional rights has had the term "unalienable rights" (or inalienable, if the speaker is confused) thrown at them. These words are nowhere to be found in the Constitution, of course, but the Declaration of Independence -- a document which is an integral piece of our history and which reflects the mindset of many of the framers, but which has no legal standing under the Constitution.
Nevertheless, it got me thinking: If we assume that those words had been included in the Constitution, then they would have legal standing -- but what would they mean? Well, "Creator" suggests that these rights come from a divine source of some kind. Many of the religions known to the framers came complete with holy books that we are told were divinely inspired. I haven't read most of them, but I'm familiar enough with the Bible to say with confidence that god never sat down with his children and laid out a list of our human rights. People keep telling me this is a Christian nation, after all, so I figured it was a good place to start.
Could someone, anyone, point to a canonized or otherwise divinely inspired religious text that would've factored into the thinking of the framers which lays out these rights for us?
