Forrest writes:
>> The reason for an armed populace is very, very fundamental:
>
> "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.
>Do you actually view it to be self-evident that we have a creator, and
that he (sorry, "He") endowed us with rights? I not only don't think
it is self-evident, but I don't even think it is at all likely. Is this
the foundation for why you believe we should have an armed populace?
>Hal
No, I do not "believe" in a god(s). No, this is not the reason for an
armed population. The reason is to keep goverment (and private
hoodlums) in check, to keep the would-be rulers constantly in fear
of the citizenry. This is the fundamental check and balance on
"political power", which, as Mao Tse-tung notes, "grows out of
the barrel of a gun" [1].
Taking a single point out of context is not a very effective means
of making a cogent argument. It can distract a reader from the essential
theory, and lead one down irrelevant lines of inquiry. The "founding
fathers", many of whom were deists [2], with a few christians, were
writing for their time, as is quite evident in the remainder of this particular
document.
[1] Quotations From Chairman Mao (Peking edition), Award Books, 1967
[2] deism: a rationalistic movement of the 17th and 18th centuries whose adherents
generally subscribed to a natural religion based on human reason and morality,
on the belief in one God who after creating the world and the laws governing it
refrained from interfering with the operation of those laws, and on the rejection
of every kind of supernatural intervention in human affairs.
--Webster's 3rd International
-- Forrest Bishop Chairman, Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering http://www.iase.cc
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