From https://time.com/6192894/self-evident-truths/
Though this may feel treacherous, it also offers us an opportunity to cast the old American story aside and forge a new one—not based on a static foundation of facts passed down to us from the founders, but on a new set of beliefs about human rights and human dignity that can propel us forward in the decades ahead.
Regardless of what America has been in the past—in all its glories and failures—the Fourth of July affords us a chance to articulate a new set of beliefs about why we exist and why we deserve to be an independent nation. Some of Jefferson’s words remain quite useful for that exercise: equality, inalienable rights, life, liberty. A government whose mandate is to safeguard the security of those who give it legitimacy. Whether or not those beliefs are factual, true, or self-evident in today’s America is secondary to forging an agreement that they are, nevertheless, worth fighting for.
That was written by Jason Steinhauer July 1, 2022 and it prompted me to get in front of the computer and search for the ‘legal origin of the phrase self-evident’. Which I did back in 2022 and promptly forgot about it until a few days ago when I found most of the following in a saved file, from which I’ll start again and add recent updates.
As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-evidence was lighting up the screen with the basics, it occurred to me the basis of that which would be ‘self -evident’ to a person would likely be formed in that person’s conscience which then instigated a search using ‘self-evident is the realization of human conscience’ as the target.
The responses to that search took Startpage three pages to remember I was seeking conscience, not consciousness and it wasn’t until reaching the fourth page that a link that included conscience showed up. It may be that the depth of the Wikipedia information convinced the Startpage search engine that no further explanation was required.
There was, though, Marxist information mixed in with the search results I thought might offer progressives some food for thought; so for what that’s worth… https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/192640/189194
Marx evaluated Hegel’s concept of Geist, of Divine Spirit, as partly false and partly true. What was false was that the Divine Spirit actually exists and that its potentialities of full rational understanding and freedom were being realized through the labor of abstract knowledge in Hegel’s philosophy. What was true was that the human being’s potential for rational understanding and freedom developed through human labor, social relationships, and language
If the Divine Spirit does not exist how can Marx identify its potentialities of full rational understanding and freedom ?
In order to understand the fundamental moral imperative of Marx, it is helpful to identify what the highest need is in a world with God and then in a world without God. In a world-view in which God is creator, a human being’s highest need is the need for God. As St. Augustine noted, the longings of the religious believer’s heart remain unsatisfied until the believer is united with God. For God is perfect truth and perfect love, and the human being’s mind and will are created by God to desire that perfection.
However, in the world-view of Marx in which humanity is its own self-creator, a human being’s highest need is the need to continue one’s own self-creation through the development of one’s own knowledge and freedom both in self and in others.
And if a human being’s highest need is the need to continue one’s own self-creation through the development of one’s own knowledge and freedom why does, as the National Post reports:
The Black Book of Communism, published by European scholars in 1997, estimates that Communist governments killed 94 million people in the 20th century. There are no explicit calls for mass murder in Marx’s writings, but he was very enthusiastic about all the ingredients that made such atrocities possible. It was Marx who endorsed a “dictatorship of the proletariat” to remake society using “despotic inroads” if necessary. It was Marx who sought to tear down any existing power structures that could check the rise of a revolutionary tyrant. And it was Marx who taught that there were no such thing as “excesses” in a revolution, and that “hated individuals” should be sacrificed to “popular revenge.” It shouldn’t be all that surprising that so many of Marx’s followers interpreted his writings as a blank cheque on killing. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once told the writer Maxim Gorky that while be loved Beethoven, he could not listen to music too often, since it baffled him to hear beauty created by people who did not realize they lived in “a filthy hell.” “They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people,” Lenin added.
Why have progressives supported antinatalism to the point world wide population is declining everywhere except Africa?
Definitely something is UNbalanced about Marxists.
After the search was expanded to ‘self-evident is the expression of the realization of human conscience’ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conscience/ emerged and right there, in the first paragraph, was what I was looking for; a clear explanation of conscience and the connection to the 17th Century which I’ve come to understand is when Humanism started gaining traction and influencing speculators which makes it, in my estimation, the introduction to the Humanism reset.
Reading the philosophical and historical literature on conscience, the first thing one would notice is the variety of meanings and psychological and ethical assessments of the concept. Different philosophical, religious and common sense approaches to conscience have emphasized different aspects of the following, broad characterization: through our individual conscience, we become aware of our deeply held moral principles, we are motivated to act upon them, and we assess our character, our behavior and ultimately our self against those principles. The resulting more specific understandings of conscience will be presented in the sections below. On any of these accounts, conscience is defined by its inward looking and subjective character, in the following sense: conscience is always knowledge of ourselves, or awareness of moral principles we have committed to, or assessment of ourselves, or motivation to act that comes from within us (as opposed to external impositions). This inward looking and subjective character of conscience is also reflected in the etymological relation between the notion of “conscience” and that of consciousness.
Only after the 17th Century did “consciousness” start to be used with a distinct meaning referring to the psychological and phenomenal dimension of the mind, rather than to its moral dimension (for an account of the terminological shift, see Jorgensen 2014).
Four hundred years later, give or take, the Western world started hearing about the New Age Movement and that will close out this blast from the almost lost past to make room for the promised post with the https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/2-Corinthians-11-13_11-15/ theme.
