One of our traditions is 'principles before personalities'. I knew if I got to know this Atheist friend of mine she would display one of the things that my Atheist father held to be true. It is the idea of the self-evident truth. It is outside of religion. In epistemology (theory of knowledge), a self-evident proposition is one that is known to be true by understanding its meaning without proof.

Some epistemologists deny that any proposition can be self-evident. For most others, the belief that oneself is conscious is offered as an example of self-evidence. However, one's belief that someone else is conscious is not epistemically self-evident.

The following propositions are often said to be self-evident:

* A finite whole is greater than any of its parts

* It is impossible for something to be and not be at the same time in the same manner.

Certain forms of argument from self-evidence are considered fallacious or abusive in debate. For example, if a proposition is claimed to be self-evident, it is an argumentative fallacy to assert that disagreement with the proposition indicates misunderstanding of it.

It is sometimes said that a self-evident proposition is one whose denial is self-contradictory. It is also sometimes said that an analytic proposition is one whose denial is self-contradictory. But these two uses of the term self-contradictory mean entirely different things. A self-evident proposition cannot be denied without knowing that one contradicts oneself (provided one actually understands the proposition). An analytic proposition cannot be denied without a contradiction, but one may fail to know that there is a contradiction because it may be a contradiction that can be found only by a long and abstruse line of logical or mathematical reasoning. Most analytic propositions are very far from self-evident. Similarly, a self-evident proposition need not be analytic: my knowledge that I am conscious is self-evident but not analytic.

An analytic proposition, however long a chain of reasoning it takes to establish it, ultimately contains a tautology, and is thus only a verbal truth: a truth established through the verbal equivalence of a single meaning. For those who admit the existence of abstract concepts, the class of non-analytic self-evident truths can be regarded as truths of the understanding--truths revealing connections between the meanings of ideas.

It is in the Constitution. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, when any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.

C H A P T E R S I X


Self-Evident Truths

I am convinced that those societies [as the Indians] which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.
-- Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787

Philadelphia became the intellectual nerve center of revolution in the mid-1770s. The Continental Congress convened there. The Declaration of Independence was drafted there, and first posted there, six weeks before the news reached the royal court in London at which it was directed. Philadelphia, the new capital of the new confederacy -- its "Grand Council fire," as Franklin called the city in some of his letters -- was becoming the commercial center of Eastern North America. The city's stately public buildings gave it an air of a capital beyond its years. When the Declaration of Independence was first posted along its streets, the Quaker city was not even a century old. Barely ninety years after the Penn family's surveyors had first marked it out of the wilderness, Philadelphia was surrounded by the mansions of merchants who had helped make it the busiest port on the Atlantic Seaboard, as well as the political and intellectual center of the colonies. The mansions reclined in baronial style along the rivers that converged at the commercial center, looking a little like English estates. Beyond these patches of tamed greenery, Philadelphians looked westward into the maw of a continent of immense size, which was to their eyes at once wild, dark, and threatening, as well as a possible source of riches beyond imagination. Rather suddenly, the men and women who had peopled a few widely scattered English colonies and stitched them together were faced with the task of making a nation, in area larger by far than any in Western Europe.

Franklin had always lived in the city's center, and never moved to the outskirts, even when his finances allowed. During the debates that welded the colonies into a nation he remained in the three-story brick house on Market Street that he had designed with his wife, Deborah, before the conclusion of the war with France. When the weather was fair, he could walk to Independence Hall. A year after skirmishes at Lexington and Concord turned angry words into armed rebellion, when the delegates to the Continental Congress decided that a rationale for the revolution needed to be put on paper, Franklin was the most likely candidate to write the manifesto. He had just returned from a long and difficult trip to the Ohio country, and had come down with gout. His three score and ten years showing on him, Franklin declined invitations to write the Declaration of Independence. He did join the drafting committee, and eventually became Thomas Jefferson's major editor.

At the age of thirty-three, however, Jefferson was not at all sure that he was equal to the task of telling the world why the colonies were breaking with Britain. On June 11, 1776, when he was asked by the Continental Congress to serve on a committee that would draft the declaration, Jefferson asked to be excused from the congress so that he could return to Williamsburg where he planned to help write the Virginia Constitution. His request for a leave denied, Jefferson asked John Adams, another member of the drafting committee, to write the document. Adams refused.

"Why will you not?" Jefferson asked Adams. "You ought to do it."

"Reasons enough," said Adams.

"What are your reasons?"

"First," said Adams, "you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Second: I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Third: You can write ten times better than I can."

"Well," replied Jefferson, "If you are decided, I will do as well as I can."

Adams respected Jefferson's "masterly pen." The young man from Virginia brought with him to the Continental Congress what Adams called "a reputation for literature, science and a happy talent for composition. Writings of his "were remarkable for . . . peculiar felicity of expression," in Adams's opinion. Like many talented writers, Jefferson did not like to compose for committees. He called changes made in his drafts by other delegates to the Continental Congress "depredations."

While he didn't always welcome changes in his prose, Jefferson easily accepted criticism and corrections from Franklin, who by this time was regarded as an elder statesman in Europe as well as in America. Franklin himself had learned, from long experience, the trials attending composition of "papers to be reviewed by a public body." Jefferson, who was learning the same, willingly submitted his drafts to Franklin and Adams.

Between 1775 and 1791, when Franklin died, his political life overlapped Jefferson's. He venerated the elderly sage, and expressed his admiration frequently. Following Franklin at the post of United States ambassador to France, Jefferson was often asked: "Is it you, Sir, who replace Dr. Franklin?" Jefferson would reply: "No one can replace him, Sir, I am just his successor."

"There appeared to me to be more respect and veneration attached to the character of Doctor Franklin than to any other person in the same country, foreign or native. . . . When he left Passy, it seemed as if the village had lost its patriarch," Jefferson recalled. Having admired Franklin so, it was not surprising that where Franklin laid down an intellectual thread, Jefferson often picked it up. Jefferson's writings clearly show that he shared Franklin's respect for Indian thought. Both men represented the Enlightenment frame of mind of which the American Indians seemed a practical example. Both knew firsthand the Indian way of life. Both shared with the Indian the wild, rich land out of which the Indian had grown. It was impossible that that experience should not have become woven into the debates and philosophical musings that gave the nation's founding instruments their distinctive character. In so far as the nation still bears these marks of its birth, we are all "Indians" -- if not in our blood, then in the thinking that to this day shapes many of our political and social assumptions.

Case in point. My friend Robin lost her father in a car accident. The grief of the loss outweighs how much she will inherit. There is much money involved which amount in the thousands. It is a family dispute that they want to keep out of probate. Robin is not after the money but she doesn't want to get screwed either. She said it was the principle of the 'thing'. My dad used look at it the same way. It impressed me. It makes me wonder how many lawyers does it take to screw in a light-bulb. It is self evident that the lawyers will obtain their share whether any of the family sees a dime.

All:
God save your majesty!

Cade:
I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

Dick:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Cade:
Nay, that I mean to do.
Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78

Dick the butcher, a character no one remembers, utters one of the few memorable lines from the entire three-part Henry the Sixth cycle. Dick's Utopian idea to kill all England's lawyers is his addition to the promises of the traitorous Jack Cade, who envisions a quasi-communistic social revolution, with himself installed as autocrat. Cade alleges that all lawyers do is shuffle parchments back and forth in a systematic attempt to ruin the common people. His demagoguery is simply a calculated appeal to simple folks' longing to be left alone. Yet one may recognize Cade's moral failings and still sympathize with Dick.

In 1987, three Supreme Court Justices convened for a mock trial, in which representatives of the poetaster Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), challenged Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. The president of American University in Washington, D.C., which sponsored the event, "drew some nervous laughter from the legal contingent in the crowd," the New York Times reported, "when he yielded to the temptation to quote the world's most-quoted English author (whoever he was) by saying, 'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. . . .'" Unsurprisingly, the justices ruled in favor of the Bard of Avon.

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/index.html

The people of the Six Nations, also known by the French term, Iroquois [1] Confederacy, call themselves the Hau de no sau nee (ho dee noe sho nee) meaning People Building a Long House. Located in the northeastern region of North America, originally the Six Nations was five and included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, migrated into Iroquois country in the early eighteenth century. Together these peoples comprise the oldest living participatory democracy on earth. Their story, and governance truly based on the consent of the governed, contains a great deal of life-promoting intelligence for those of us not familiar with this area of American history. The original United States representative democracy, fashioned by such central authors as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, drew much inspiration from this confederacy of nations. In our present day, we can benefit immensely, in our quest to establish anew a government truly dedicated to all life's liberty and happiness much as has been practiced by the Six Nations for over 800 hundred years.

Dating the Iroquois Confederacy

by Bruce E. Johansen



The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, one of the world's oldest democracies, is at least three centuries older than most previous estimates, according to research by Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields of Toledo University, Ohio.

Using a combination of documentary sources, solar eclipse data, and Iroquois oral history, Mann and Fields assert that the Iroquois Confederacy's body of law was adopted by the Senecas (the last of the five nations to ratify it) August 31, 1142. The ratification council convened at a site that is now a football field in Victor, New York. The site is called Gonandaga by the Seneca.

Mann, a doctoral student in American Studies at Toledo University of Ohio; Fields, an astronomer, is an expert in the history of solar eclipses. The Senecas' oral history mentions that the Senecas adopted the Iroquois Great Law of Peace shortly after a total eclipse of the sun.

Mann and Fields are the first scholars to combine documentary history with oral accounts and precise solar data in an attempt to date the origin of the Iroquois League. Depending on how democracy is defined, their date of 1142 A.D. would rank the Iroquois Confederacy with the government of Iceland and the Swiss cantons as the oldest continuously functioning democracy on earth. All three precedents have been cited as forerunners of the United States system of representative democracy. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy functions today in Upstate New York; it even issues passports.

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/DatingIC.html