liquid

Godless sodomite! How can you dare talk of the founders in that disrespectful manner?!

Henry VIII would be turning in his grave

Jarlaxle

bah! you all know without a doubt they understood our rights come from God. No need in arguing, it is quite evident.

2tadpoles

"Creator" can mean different things to different people. As someone already mentioned, some may think of their parents as being their creator. For all we know, the Big Bang could have been our creator.

"Creator" does not = "white, male deity."

Look at this quote again:
"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."

So if you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, equal rights for women are unconstitutional, since the writers proclaimed that all men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights. The ERA was not something our forefathers would have endorsed, so it must be.

And life is not an unalienable right, since our country uses the death penalty. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not unalienable rights, because if you are imprisoned for a crime then you lose both. The military can also deny liberty to a servicemember.

So, tell us again how literally you want to take those words?

Godless Sodomite

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if some Americans thought that WWJD? stood for "What Would Jefferson Do?"

-Jerry

Daydreamer

I think the most likely origin for these 'inalienable' rights as per the Constitution and Declaration of Idependence were the Elightenment thinkers they had read. In particular I think Rousseau's 1762 The Social Contract may be the guily party.

As for the 'endowed by their creator' bit of the Declaration, it is important to remember the religious minorities who moved to America to avoid persecution. That said, there would have been a very widespread stereotype about England being a dangerous religious hotbed, and we would expect any documents written by American's with this belief (whether correctly or not is irrelevent) about the English to try and take advantage of this fact.

Now, the Declaration itself - since it was written to start the Revolutionary War, at which point the rebels only had about a third of the population in support of their actions, they would have done whatever they could to increase their support base, and drawing on this religious persecution complex would have been the perfect way of doing it. Thus it is likely that the founding fathers wrote the Declaration to be sensationalistic, whether intentionally or not.

ashibaka

What's that up in the sky?
Is it a logical person?
Is it a thinking human being?
No! It's SUPERTROLL!

Hey, if you got no evidence, you be a troll. Evidence please.

Bill Snedden

Hmmm...

The Declaration was written before the Constitution, and is a document not produced by the United States (as the governmental entity known as "the United States" came into being as a result of the ratification of the Constitution). The Declaration cannot therefore be "unconstitutional".

Neither can the Constitution itself be "unconstitutional". That would be rather like saying, "A circle is un-circular!" A self-evident contradiction.

Whether or not the Founders believed our rights to come from God is irrelevant. The fact is that it is the Constitution, not the Declaration, that sets forth the laws to be used by the U.S. government to protect whatever rights we do have. Where those rights came from simply isn't relevant and the Founders themselves expressly realized this by their use of the Ninth Amendment. That amendment explicitly states that not all of the rights of the people are enumerated in the Constitution, and ensures that their absence doesn't prevent people from having them. By that amendment, the Founders made a clear statement that rights themselves are not dependent upon governments, but the laws that support or deny them most certainly are. It is those laws, not the rights, that are contained in the Constitution and it is the law protecting the right of freedom of religion that is being violated by the 1954 amendment to the Pledge.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

P.S. the majority of the Founding Fathers were Deists (in case you didn't know), which makes their ideas of how "rights" are granted to us by the Creator substantially different to the idea of how "rights" are granted by a Christian God. Specifically, the rights granted by the Deist creator are held to be "unalienable". That is, they cannot be abrogated, not even by the god who gave them to us (because they are part of our nature, as human beings). Christian orthodoxy holds that our "rights" derive from God's will and he can revoke them at any time (and, if the Bible be true, he frequently has). The Founders would likely not have recognized this as having "rights" at all.