Selections from The DOI...which I found to be painfully relevant as I read it this morning:
"He (King George) has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
"For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us"
"For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent"
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
Read it for yourself at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/
4 comments:
So, Do you think this Squares with Romans 13 or not? That is the puzzle of the millennium.
I read the above passage today and it reminded me of your question...I guess, I didnt answer it...but enflamed the question more.
Imagine a young man about 23 years old. As an agent of the British Empire, he wears a red coat. He believes that the colonies face a situation of "anarchy" and chaos. For generations, the British government has maintained law and order, and he has been told that this stability is threatened by lawless hordes who vandalize tax-paying merchants while dressed as Indians. Based on reports of a large cache of arms in Lexington and threats of armed revolution, he has been sent away from his family in Liverpool to help maintain order in the colonies.
Oh dear. This nice young man has just had a large part of his face and shoulders blown away by the musket fire of an outraged tax-resister. This colonist (and others like him) apparently believed that this young British agent evinced "a design to reduce them under absolute despotism." As the officer lies dying in a pool of his own blood, the revolutionary "minute-man" rejoices in his victory over this red-coat's objective of the "establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states." [Language from the Declaration of Independence.]
Is this a loving (1 Corinthians 13:5-7) or righteous (John 7:24; Exodus 23:2; Proverbs. 24:21) judgment of this young human being? Was this British soldier a budding Adolph Hitler, or a "good Christian family man"?
Was this revolutionary killing the beginning, or the end, of a Christian nation?
Seems to me that the doctrines found in the Declaration where derived from the Huguenots and the Scots who endured some pretty massive oppression at the hands of the Catholic Church and the political derivatives of it.
Many of these oppressed folks fled to America and brought their ethics with them. I suspect that their ancestors who rose up to drive the British out where hardly oppressed at all in comparison. But they valued the freedoms that their ancestors lacked to the point that they where willing to die over seemingly minor things.
I would suppose you could study that for ages -- But I do wonder what minor things we are willing to die over?
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