“The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the Grace of God.” Thomas Jefferson
For most of the 6,000 years of recorded history, power has been held in the hands of a few. Prior to the establishment of America’s Republic form of government, from Roman Emperors, Norman Conquerors, German Kings, African Tribal Chiefs, Byzantine Emperors, Indian Maharajas, Mongolian Khans, Ottoman Sultans, Holy Roman Emperors, to Chinese Emperors, the default for human government power was concentrated in the hands of a single individual.
Monarchs claimed their status as the “chosen” intermediary between the people and the divinity legitimized their authoritarian rule. Medieval European monarchs claimed a divine right of kings. Their reasoning went that since it was God’s will for them to be king, whatever they will must be God’s will. Even Karl Marx, in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843, agreed with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that monarch was the supreme form of government.
King James I of England defended the divine right of kings to Parliament: “The state of monarch is the most supreme thing upon earth, for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.” In True Law of Free Monarchies, King James wrote “In parliament (which is nothing else but the head court of the king and his vassals) the laws are but craved by his subjects, and only made by him at their [Parliament’s] proposal and with their advice. . .” He reasoned that Parliament was unable to make law without his “scepter” giving it the force of law. He also stated that as king, being over the law, he was master of the whole land and every person, having the power over life and death of every one. King James used his “scepter” as the original executive order.
Clarence E. Manion, Professor of Constitutional Law and dean of the Notre Dame College of Law, as quoted in Verne Paul Kaub’s book, Collectivism Challenges Christianity, 1946, stated: “Look closely at these self-evident truths, these imperishable articles of American faith upon which all our government is firmly based. First and foremost is the existence of God. Next comes the truth that all men are equal in the sight of God. Third is the fact of God’s great gift of unalienable rights to every person on earth. Then follow the true and single purpose of All American governments, namely, to preserve and protect these God-made rights of God-made man.”
But if there is no God, as the left wants you to believe, where do rights come from, except from the generosity of the government? Nazism, Fascism, Socialism, and Communism teach that citizens exist for the state’s benefit. The Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet purges, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s killing fields, which took the lives of millions, did not take place in a vacuum. There was a philosophical background preceding them which taught that the state was the ultimate authority.
Without God, government transitions from being the policeman protecting your property to the policeman owning your property. Without God, government transitions from being the servant of the people to their master.
Jean Jacque Rousseau [1712-1778], wrote in The Social Contract “The citizen is no longer the judge of the dangers to which the law desires him to expose himself; and when the prince says to him: ‘It is expedient for the State that you should die,” he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State.”
“Dictatorship, by whatever name, is founded on the doctrine that the individual amounts to nothing; that the State is the only thing that counts; and that men and women and children were put on earth solely for the purpose of serving the state.” President Harry S. Truman
Source: Change to Chains by William J. Federer
