Question for the Constitionalists out there

[BoltNut]

Reading through this entire thread confirms my opinion that we need to leave the Constitution alone.

 

[ArnautDaniel]

Your point? Are you saying it is NOT founded on principle?

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.

I'm just saying that if it was founded on principles, then people should simply annunciate and defend those principles on their own merits without appealing to the "authority" of the founding fathers.

That is EXACTLY what I am denying. Human nature fundamentally CANNOT and DOES NOT change.

Then you disagree with the founding fathers who were immersed in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which took a very optimistic view of the improvement of humankind.

And it was upon this principle, primarily imo, that the founding fathers drafted the Constitution - knowing human nature, its inherent weaknesses, flaws and frailties, ESPECIALLY w/r to power and the damage humans can do whence they possess it that they drafted the document upon which our government is founded - constructing it with built-in checks and balances designed to prevent the very abuses that frail humans, tempted with greed, and avarice, and lust for power they knew we would be inexorably prone to exhibit.

Nah, this is just right-wing Christians trying to build Christian theology into the thought of the 18th century that wasn't ever there.

The philosophies prevalent during the Enlightenment were opposed to the sort of thing you are saying here.

Technology progresses, yes; knowledge too - but history is anything if not a record of the inherent immutability of human nature.

Has the computer improved on human nature? The cell phone? Space travel? Nuclear physics? Quantum mechanics? General or Special Relativity? String Theory? Technology advances - as does human knowledge - to some artificially manufactured point of "enlightenment." Did crime stop with this "enlightenment?" Did war? Did greed? Did lust, avarice, hatred stop once we became "enlightened?"

But neither technology nor the advancement of knowledge that produces it possesses the power to change human nature. It simply cannot - it's immutable. God can change human nature - but man? The mere thought is hubris itself.

I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about the principles espoused by the founding fathers, but it seems you've wandered afield.

And look up "the Enlightenment", it is a term for a period in Western thought which followed the Renaissance.

Check out Locke and Rousseau. Neither of these Enlightenment thinkers held humankind to be basically bad. In fact they basically held that humankind was basically good, and society made them bad. So the goal was to recreate society so that it stopped making good people bad (not, as you say, to keep basically bad people in their place).