The ringing phrases of The Declaration of Independence speak to everyone who strives for liberty and supports the principles of self-government. Click here to read more about the Declaration of Independence. Until I could no longer walk the several blocks to the fromt steps of Main Hall at Salem College, Winston-Salem, NC, we would sit in folding chairs and hear the Moravian brass band playing patriotic and sacred music.
This was prior to the complete reading of the Declaration of Independence — first done in this place in making it the very first Independence Day celerbration in our great country!!! This year, , there will be a naturalization ceremony immediately after the reading.
We have a picnic lunch at home, but before anyone can eat, we read the Declaration of Independence. Copies of the Declaration can be obtained from your menber of Congress, as well as Heritage and other organizations.
Our tradition started many years ago, and we find it rewarding as well as a reminder of the principles of liberty, the origin of our rights, and what was wrong with British rule. Speaking of living up to human potential, I like what president John Adams said about basic principles. The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.
Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost. There is no authority, civil or religious — there can be no legitimate government but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it. All without it is rebellion and perdition, or in more orthodox words damnation. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company: I mean hell. The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity and humanity.
Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. What a Eutopia — what a Paradise would this region be! I have examined all religions, and the result is that the Bible is the best book in the world. Please correct my thinking. Thank you. Admittedly, it takes some time but it is not just pageantry. It is a moment to give tribute to those in uniform, carrying arms, most of whom fought remotely to preserve our Religious Freedom.
Many sons and daughters of the church served, some gave all. During the service several rose and watched to see who still could when the service songs were played.
The church has a history of proud service. They were met and turned back with never a weapon or rocket fired. I was trained as an fighter-interceptor pilot.
I never had to go on a scramble. Before America was an independent state, it was a dependent colony. Before Americans expressed support for equality, their government and society were aristocratic and highly hierarchical.
In fact, only commercial and cultural ties with Britain served to unify the colonies. The Declaration announced America's separation from one of the world's most powerful empires: Britain. Parliament's taxes imposed without American representation, along with King George III's failure to address or ease his subjects' grievances, made dissolving the "bands which have connected them" not just a choice, but an urgent necessity.
As the Declaration made clear, the "long train of abuses and usurpations" and the tyranny exhibited "over these States" forced the colonists to "alter their former system of Government. Under the new "system," Americans would govern themselves. America did not secede from the British Empire to be alone in the world.
But Virginians also knew that their slave system was reproducing itself naturally. They could eliminate the slave trade without eliminating slavery. That was not true in the West Indies or Brazil. To make any claim of this nature would open them to charges of rank hypocrisy that were best left unstated. If the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, thought slavery was morally corrupt, how did they reconcile owning slaves themselves, and how was it still built into American law?
Two arguments offer the bare beginnings of an answer to this complicated question. The first is that the desire to exploit labor was a central feature of most colonizing societies in the Americas, especially those that relied on the exportation of valuable commodities like sugar, tobacco, rice and much later cotton. Cheap labor in large quantities was the critical factor that made these commodities profitable, and planters did not care who provided it — the indigenous population, white indentured servants and eventually African slaves — so long as they were there to be exploited.
To say that this system of exploitation was morally corrupt requires one to identify when moral arguments against slavery began to appear.
One also has to recognize that there were two sources of moral opposition to slavery, and they only emerged after One came from radical Protestant sects like the Quakers and Baptists, who came to perceive that the exploitation of slaves was inherently sinful. But the great problem that Jefferson faced — and which many of his modern critics ignore — is that he could not imagine how black and white peoples could ever coexist as free citizens in one republic.
There was, he argued in Query XIV of his Notes , already too much foul history dividing these peoples. And worse still, Jefferson hypothesized, in proto-racist terms, that the differences between the peoples would also doom this relationship. He thought that African Americans should be freed — but colonized elsewhere. Yet we also have to recognize that he was trying to grapple, I think sincerely, with a real problem.
No historical account of the origins of American slavery would ever satisfy our moral conscience today, but as I have repeatedly tried to explain to my Stanford students, the task of thinking historically is not about making moral judgments about people in the past. Working at the intersection of hardware and software engineering, researchers are developing new techniques for improving 3D displays for virtual and augmented reality technologies.
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