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"All Men Were Created Equal"

Started by PickelledEggs, August 09, 2013, 11:00:55 PM

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mykcob4

Drunkenshoe. You have a very limited view. the term "men" doesn't just mean male gender. Ask any credible English professor and they will soundly instruct you about the term.
Also "universal Sufferage" is a recognition term about prior and ongoing events in history. You can't just dismiss the fact that the U.S. Constitution addressed the difference of the rights of common man and the rights of divine authority, for that is exactly what did and does do. Also not understanding the phrase "all men are created equal" because YOU want to accept only a very literal definition doesn't really define the phrase at all.
Since the statement of "all men are created equal" is in the Declaration of Independence" and not in the U. S. Constitution. Defining what the constitution they way you have done makes no sense. 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.

Solomon Zorn

O.K. , this is my first post on a topic, so go easy on me. But it seems to me that the question of what it meant to the writers is less important than what it means to us through our (hopefully) more enlightened viewpoint today. I would like to think that the authors meant ALL men AND women, but that just isn't realistic. I hope though that we, today, can see it as something we can reinterpret and use as a precept to write more humanistic laws. Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are certainly a good place to start.
If God Exists, Why Does He Pretend Not to Exist?
Poetry and Proverbs of the Uneducated Hick

http://www.solomonzorn.com

mykcob4

Quote from: "Solomon Zorn"O.K. , this is my first post on a topic, so go easy on me. But it seems to me that the question of what it meant to the writers is less important than what it means to us through our (hopefully) more enlightened viewpoint today. I would like to think that the authors meant ALL men AND women, but that just isn't realistic. I hope though that we, today, can see it as something we can reinterpret and use as a precept to write more humanistic laws. Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are certainly a good place to start.
Of course you are correct. Despite semantics its the meaning NOW that is important.

Plu

It's generally a good thing to remind people that history is mostly filled with people acting like assholes to everyone, because it might inspire us to do better in the future.

It's like how people who say "I wish I could live in the middle ages" make me cringe. No you don't. You really don't. That's just your ignorance of just how shitty the middle ages were talking.

Plu

It's mostly the teaching part where it goes wrong. You need to explain to people the difference between a good story and what really happened. Fake stories about the romanticised middle ages are at least as entertaining as real stories about the middle ages, but they simply aren't real, and people shouldn't accept them as such.

But if you teach them to distuinguish fairy-tales from myth, they might stop believing in gawd, so it's best to be careful with that  :roll:

Solomon Zorn

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"... It's very important for children and obviously adults to be aware of what that statement really meant to writers or for people then. Historical perspective...

I agree with you on that. I wasn't advocating the rewriting of history, or ignoring what our founding fathers were really like. I despise coloring the past to suit your own ideology. I only meant that we need to be able to agree on some precepts underlying our laws today. Treating ALL as equal under the law is obviously a good starting point, and the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are an excellent foundation. Much better than the 10 commandments, for example (shudder). So from a practical standpoint isn't it beneficial to reinterpret their idea for our times? Not when teaching history, but for the purpose of consensus about what our priorities should be when framing new laws.
If God Exists, Why Does He Pretend Not to Exist?
Poetry and Proverbs of the Uneducated Hick

http://www.solomonzorn.com

aitm

as long as no one tries to say that Abe Lincoln was NOT a vampire hunter.
A humans desire to live is exceeded only by their willingness to die for another. Even god cannot equal this magnificent sacrifice. No god has the right to judge them.-first tenant of the Panotheust

Solitary

Moody---so that's what you call it?  #-o  Solitary
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

SilentFutility

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"
Quote from: "Plu"It's like how people who say "I wish I could live in the middle ages" make me cringe. No you don't. You really don't. That's just your ignorance of just how shitty the middle ages were talking.

If you promote fantasy shows with scantily clad young women obeying and serving strong, big muscled, powerful men clashing swords all they long as if they are a piece of history, while you culturally pump/hype up two narrow gender roles for male and female in every piece of visual 'thing' and teach about Middle Ages to children with an understanding of PC game Age of Empires, their ignorance becomes the new history and reality in time and you'll be a nutjob minority living in another world.

E: Check American movie web sites. You'll find 300 Spartans in history section.

Age of Empires helped my understanding of the middle ages as a kid:
-countless farmers doing back-breaking work all day for little to no reward only to be slaughtered by people on a whim
-slightly luckier people getting paid to be in some sort of army...until they get sent on futile campaigns and raids in distant lands dying in droves
-one fat king sitting in his castle hoarding all the gold

:lol:

Colanth

Quote from: "Plu"It's mostly the teaching part where it goes wrong. You need to explain to people the difference between a good story and what really happened.
People who have been trained from birth to accept the Bible as fact will accept any nonsense as fact.
Afflicting the comfortable for 70 years.
Science builds skyscrapers, faith flies planes into them.

mykcob4

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"
Quote from: "Solomon Zorn"O.K. , this is my first post on a topic, so go easy on me. But it seems to me that the question of what it meant to the writers is less important than what it means to us through our (hopefully) more enlightened viewpoint today. I would like to think that the authors meant ALL men AND women, but that just isn't realistic. I hope though that we, today, can see it as something we can reinterpret and use as a precept to write more humanistic laws. Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are certainly a good place to start.

Despite the common belief in the forum, I am not pushing this -or any other subject- just to annoy people.

It's very important for children and obviously adults to be aware of what that statement really meant to writers or for people then. Historical perspective. If you over interpret something like this in a politically correct way and convey it conveniently to present day in today's terms, you are teaching something wrong. And that is not something about  semantics, that's something basic to their individual and collective identity.

American culture does this to almost every historical/political concept available/suitable. Sweeps the crucial nuances of the historical perspective of an event, the real cultural inheritence developed in time and turn it to some bright painted fast food menu and shove it down children's throats from every corner. AND Turns around and define its own people as STUPID, a nation of retarded people proud of their ignorance.  THEN wonder why a very large group of American people have some fantastical, destructive understanding of 'freedom' or 'independence' and living in delusion. In short it creates a disoriented, delusional understanding of their own and its dangerous. You are suffering from this. Badly.

Declaration of Independence is probably the most important event in your history, the basic education you all receive, anything about it is etched into your brains since you're little kids. Would there be a civil war leading to that end if there wasn't a Declaration of Independence? What would happen to the historical process of abolishing slavery as we know it? How about the fight between the Republicans and Democrats today? Where do its roots lie? It's the freaking 'tabula rasa' of American identity for two opposite, clashing sides. Doesn't that tell you anything? You are responsible with teaching what this document really meant then to your own people in its own historical perspective with its good and ugly and bad; its development. This is what it means today; how you came to this point, that development. Not just some sort of a disoriented, glossed over interpretation of its most important statement carried as some 'conclusion' over all American times. Let me remind you that when that piece of paper was written and signed, non white people were slaves and now you have a black president elected for the second term.

Why act like as if it carried something more than it did? What value it would have today really, if it didn't inspire or become something more? None. Just 'oh look we kicked some empire ass 250 years ago!' which was an eventual thing to come under any circumstances. What a big deal. Suprise, history runs on empires oppressing nations and nations kicking back. That's the only game in town. Do you have anything more? That is the question.
If you had read exrensively anything that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison had thought about the constitution, you would understand how they felt about equality.
Solitary is correct when he said that the intent of the authors of the constittution was to treat everyone equaly.
Hamilton was interested in the financial and economics of the new government. He felt that opportunity came from everyone having the same rights to make money. That included the negro. He was from the carribean after all and he knew full well that negros were the equal of every white man. Madison was the great legal mind of his era. He knew that he could write in a path for equality so he made that path happen despite many of the other congress men. John Jay wasan idealist that saw a time when all Americans would enjoy political and legal equality. These were the primary writers of the constitution. They fought to instill a path for total equality for all men AND women. They were fighting people that didn't understand their big picture vision of the new nation. Most congressmen at the time wanted a England type government that exckuded the king, a very short sighted view. So yes Drunkenshoe I find your interpretation shortsighted and limited. You are correct in describing the majority of the original founders, but they didn't get exactly what they intended or wanted, unbeknownced to them. Madison in particular was very clever in installing a path for total equality.

mykcob4

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"So my interpretation is 'shortsighted' and 'limited', because I am evaluating a statement as it was written, signed and declared from the aspect of 53 men who are responsible from it, but not from the aspect of some other 3 who 'actually' felt something else in their hearts while signing it?  

Sorry, mykcob. It looks like I was dead on, because what you are offering up there is a very disoriented vision of history, and what people felt; what they would have liked to see there according to your sentiments -or anyone else's- is not an interpretation. Nowhere near kinda not.
Don't apologize to me for you being wrong. I can't help that. Like I said if you had ever read those men exstensively maybe you'd know.

Hijiri Byakuren

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"So my interpretation is 'shortsighted' and 'limited', because I am evaluating a statement as it was written, signed and declared from the aspect of 53 men who are responsible from it, but not from the aspect of some other 3 who 'actually' felt something else in their hearts while signing it?  

Sorry, mykcob. It looks like I was dead on, because what you are offering up there is a very disoriented vision of history, and what people felt; what they would have liked to see there according to your sentiments -or anyone else's- is not an interpretation. Nowhere near kinda not.
You... do realize that those men wrote other documents expressing their private thoughts, yes?
Speak when you have something to say, not when you have to say something.

Sargon The Grape - My Youtube Channel

Hijiri Byakuren

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"[spoil:27st1zw1]That a statement which was put into a nation's declaration of independence 250 years ago, before human rights bill, any official recognition or acceptance of universal human suffrage, women's suffrage, while slavery and every fucking atrocity went full throttle for almost 100 years after it was signed, ACTUALLY MEANT that time something more than it tells, BECAUSE 3 few good men among the 56 responsible for it actually DREAMT, FELT and THOUGHT and had better INTENTIONS about it.

Is this how you perceive historical events in your nation's past and their consequences in shaping your culture, becoming factors, naturally to develop into something else today? You are basically saying there wasn't any development, but what has been put from the beginning was what we claim to have now. This is against reality, not to mention basic rationality.

Come to think of it, this also explains a lot actually. Because this exactly sounds like a good starting point for a very unhealthy, delusional understanding of 'freedom' policy -be it domestic or international- being embraced by this culture as something real, possible and thriving, pushed by a brutal power of a totalitarian state, which finally became the American Empire that runs on corporate democracy. I mean think about the general culture from its most trivial point to the deepest old roots. One State directing 50 states as companies in an enormous corporation. Two opposite sides, one manual, no rules.

I bet these few good men are actually idealised not just because they're the heroic figures of the event, but probably what they expressed is actually the plain, straight, primitive version of the multilayered, pumped up bullshit going on now. And while evaluating this statement, you are turning it to something else needlessly to load some extra value in it, while the reality of that process also what they intended but had to sign MEANS much more in terms of any development made since then.

And my view is limited, because I don't have some taught idealisation of a few individual's intentions and feelings and refuse to interpret an official statement in this idealised way, but taking it literally.  :-|[/spoil:27st1zw1]
You haven't responded to a single goddamn thing anyone said.
Speak when you have something to say, not when you have to say something.

Sargon The Grape - My Youtube Channel

Hijiri Byakuren

Quote from: "drunkenshoe"
Quote from: "Hijiri Byakuren"You haven't responded to a single goddamn thing anyone said.

Really? Like what for example? "You are wrong." "Your view is limited, I know how they felt." "They didn't mean what they wrote, but what they felt which was greater than what they wrote." Give me a fucking break.

History of United Sates didn't get cut from human history, and its basic issues and started to exist on some other plane alone when the country got his independence.

Americans' understanding of their own history and any accomplishments or developments that came with it are so exaggerated, painted and blown out of proportion, the way past events, concepts and facts are defined reached some sort of heights where people now perceive them as equal to what they were identified with 250 years ago.

And talking about this with Americans is like talking to a brick wall, as it happens with other few subjects.
Ah yes, rather than respond to any real points, let's make up strawman versions of what people are saying and insult their entire country while we're at it. After all, everything you say is right and anything to the contrary is wrong, evidence be damned.

I don't feel the need to dignify anything you say with a proper response until you get off your bloody high horse. :roll:
Speak when you have something to say, not when you have to say something.

Sargon The Grape - My Youtube Channel