In a previous post we discussed the origins of the foundational ideas that the United States was built upon. We discussed the common education and understanding of guiding principles shared by the founders. This understanding and knowledge came from the minds of many great men who had thought and written years before America's birth. We already talked about Cicero. Now let's look to some others that inspired the founders.
If Cicero provided a foundation that there is a concept of Natural Law delivered by the hand of a Natural Law Giver, then others expounded upon what rights are inherit under that law. One among these is the Englishman, John Locke. Locke wrote:
"The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which . . . teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property . . .And, being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another." (Second Essay Concerning Civil Government, Great Bookos of the Western World, vol. 35)
Notice what Locke is saying here:
1. those of us in Nature have been given a set of Laws which govern our behavior
2. we are all equal and independent under that law
3. we are all created by the same all-powerful Creator
4. we are the servants of the Creator
5. we are here by the order of the Creator
6. we are here to do the Creator's business
7. we are the property of the Creator
8. as such, we are not free to harm each other by the exercise of our own personal freedoms
To get to the details of the rights that are inherit within this structure of Natural Law, we look to William Blackstone, who wrote:
"Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture."
This is what is meant by our founders when they say "unalienable" rights: they are given to us directly by our Creator and are therefore to be respected, protected, and never tread upon by humans or human government
s. They are "natural" rights.
Then, barely a decade before the Declaration of Independence was written, Blackstone penned the following:
"And these natural rights may be reduced to three principal or primary articles: the right of personal security, the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property; because as there is no other known method of compulsion, or of abridging man's natural free will, but by an infringement or diminution of one or other of these important rights, the preservation of these, inviolate, may justly be said to include the preservation of our civil immunities in their largest and most extensive sense."
So Blackstone summarizes man's natural rights into three main categories:
1. personal security
2. private property
3. personal liberty
Any time a government, individual, or body of any kind infringes upon these three basic, God-given rights, according to Blackstone, a violation of God's laws themselves is occurring. It certainly makes one wonder about the current state of affairs in our country today, where the government, the court system, and other powers that be are allowed, under the law, to infringe on each of these.
One can see a clear progression of thought here. Going from Cicero's declaration that there is a Natural Law provided by a Natural Law Giver, and Locke's testament that we have rights that are inherent under that Law, and Blackstone's delineation of what those specific rights are, we can see the philosophical thread, congruent with a scriptural world view, that took shape to form the basis of America's founding.
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