- Tyrannical governments and global oligarchs meet in Egypt
- The Right of the People to alter or to abolish destructive governments
Today I heard that on the first page of the laws of the United States there are the words, “The laws of nature and the laws of nature’s God, referring to the Creation and the Bible.
I tried to verify this via a search of the internet when I stumbled upon a table of laws of the Plymouth Colony established by the Puritans sometime after 1620.
Being an Australian I don’t know a lot about the Puritans or the founding the United States. I have however read the book “The Island in the Centre of the World” by Russell Shorto which challenges the myth associated with the founding of America at Plymouth Rock and tells the story of the Dutch settlement of Manhattan.
Shorto argues that the true birth of America as a multicultural nation that values individual liberties and respects religious freedoms was founded on Manhattan by the Dutch.
Whether Plymouth Rock or Manhattan is the source of Kathy and her lover’s search for America (Simon & Garfunkel), the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock were fleeing religious intolerance, their faith was strict, and the laws of the United States do flow from the Plymouth Declaration made over 400 hundred years ago.
The Plymouth Declaration opens with the idea that the United States has a right to be a separate nation because of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
Looking at the laws of the Plymouth Colony their society is restrictive but not beyond contemplation or imagination.
The American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence made 156 years later enshrines freedoms that very few common people enjoyed at that time of the American Revolution in England, Europe, or in some countries even today.
It is hard for us to think what it would be like to live 400 years ago. Just as it would be hard to know what a person living in the Plymouth Colony would think of the modern world.
On the 24th of November this year thanksgiving will be celebrated. The thanksgiving feast remembers the thanksgiving of the Plymouth pilgrims in November 1621, 401 years ago.
Whether we lived then or now we should count our blessings and give thanks in whatever age we live. We are all concerned with similar things no matter when we live: Basic freedoms; concern for our family, issues of work and livelihood, our relationships with community and country, dealing with authorities, matters of health and coping with the ever-changing environment.
Fundamentally I understand the motivation to live a life pleasing to God as did the Puritans. Even so, the Plymouth Colonial laws look strange judging by today’s standards.
Even judging by the laws at the time the letters of the New Testament were written 2,000 years ago, the Plymouth laws look harsh. But were they?
My great great grandfather Isaac Cockcroft was transported from England to a sparsely inhabited continent on the other side of the planet for stealing a penny of cloth less than 200 years ago.
The sentence Isaac got was death, commuted to transportation. Isaac’s mother Eleanor died the year that Isaac was transported.
Did Eleanor die of heart break or of poverty. We do not know. Eleanor’s name means God is my light or shining light.
I am sure Isaac was the light of his mother’s life as all sons are to their mothers; and true to his name, Isaac would have given Eleanor reason to laugh. Once transported Eleanor never saw Isaac again.
My family remember Eleanor because of her maiden name Burgess. Isaac gave that name as a middle name to all his Australian born children. Later, as was common amongst convicts in Australia in the third generation, the surname Cockcroft was dropped but the name Burgess survived.
Things were as different 200 years ago as they were 400 years ago. The consequences of stealing a penny of cloth in 1835 in England was not “repay double the value of what was stolen or be whipped as it was in the Plymouth Colony in the 1620s”: It was the death penalty.
Fortunately for Isaac English judges rebelled and commuted death sentences to transportation to the colonies. Nevertheless, transportation was much more devastating for Isaac and his family than the Plymouth Colonial theft law!
It was the tyrannical harshness of the English that resulted in the American Revolution 50 years earlier. The irony is that but for the American Revolution, Isaac would have been transported to America instead of Australia.
Growing up in Australia, despite my heritage, until recently felt free. But because of what has happened over the past three years, all of this is again moot, and not just in Australia. Once again, we are all concerned about our freedoms and tyrannical governments.
Our God given freedoms are being taken away from working people. Political correctness is quashing our freedom of speech and tyranny is now global and in lockstep.
“Our governments” are meeting in Egypt, where they are openly discussing limiting our freedom to travel, our freedom to accumulate wealth through our own enterprise. “Our governments also want to control how much energy we consume and what food we will be allowed to eat?
The irony here is that God freeing Egyptian slaves led the freed to Mt Sinai where God gave His laws to Moses in 1445 BC. The current meetings in Egypt, also near Mt Sinai, 2,468 years later, are drafting man made laws that will enslave.
In Australia people have lost jobs for merely being associated with a church. Unborn and unwanted babies are being murdered everywhere and their unexplained deaths of children and young adults. In Canada doctors weigh the value to society of the lives of the depressed and the disabled.
Tyranny now has a global dimension as treacherous “governments” meet with unelected global oligarchs to save the planet and enrich themselves.
The source of today’s laws is very different from the laws of Moses, the laws of Plymouth in the 1620s or the laws of England in the 1830s.
As a result, we the people are again thinking about the laws of nature and the laws of nature’s God as “governments” of today and global businesses “defy God and embrace tyranny and democide?
Because of this our thoughts are turning to the words… “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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 whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it (destructive governments), and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them (we the people- the governed) shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”
