[MD] Coerce me? How?

[plattholden at gmail.com]

On 9 Jun 2009 at 15:26, Arlo Bensinger wrote:

> [Platt]
> Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
> 
> [Arlo]
> So spaketh slave owners and protagonists of genocide against the 
> indigenous peoples. If they wrote "leprechauns exist", I suppose 
> you'd believe in them.


Gee, I wonder why I would tend to believe those who founded a nation 
over a college instructor or some modern SOM intellectual?. 


> "And yet, although Jefferson called this doctrine of social equality 
> "self-evident," it is not at all self-evident. Scientific evidence 
> and the social evidence of history indicate the opposite is 
> self-evident. There is no "self-evidence" in European history that 
> all men are created equal. There's no nation in Europe that doesn't 
> trace its history to a time when it was "self-evident" that all men 
> are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given 
> credit for this doctrine, certainly didn't get it from the history of 
> Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World 
> upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of 
> individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the 
> "Noble Savage." (Pirsig)
> 
> He got it from CONTEMPLATION. It's an intellectual pattern. And these 
> derive from culture.

No. The founders and their forebears got it from REVELATION.

What did culture derive from?