The Declaration of Independence is not a Puritan or Calvinist or Methodist or Baptist or Protestant or Catholic or Christian document, but a document of the Enlightenment.
In my limited experience of reading governmental documents the key to enlightenment is decoding the semantics.
"The Age of Enlightenment's inattention to hygiene is well documented," he remarks.
While Enlightenment thinkers sought to advance the public good — producing documents like The Bill of Rights — they also used reason to justify colonialism and slavery).
Before the so-called Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries, scholar Ivan Hannaford documents in an influential study, the orthodox explanation of racial diversity was derived in the main from two stories from Genesis.
They look at our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution (which even some of our own citizens have never read) and can talk about the Founders place in the Enlightenment and their use of Natural Law in the language of these documents.
These rights are specified in our founding documents, written by some of the best thinkers in the Enlightenment era, though they would probably change some wording today.
For a song whose lyrics ostensibly document an attempt to gather the spiritual strength to overcome adversity and thereby attain enlightenment, The Climb is about as inspiring as a Lion bar.
But recently historian Jan Golinski, in researching Enlightenment attitudes about the weather, rescued the diary, identified its author, and set out to subject the document to its first serious scholarly study since its creation.
Thomas Jefferson, the Enlightenment philosopher and politician who enshrined the concepts of egalitarianism and expanding liberties in America's founding document, the Declaration of Independence, was long an advocate of the West.
First, he concedes that "France" or "Spain" never appear in the document, and that the final document addresses a wide array of issues such as natural rights, Enlightenment ideas, and the establishment of a new and independent state (xxiv xxv).
