Accepting the Challenge…Kind of

I was challenged the other day during a phone conversation with a friend who had several comments to make on last week’s Freedom Friday post. Though her comments will remain between us, she seriously stimulated my thinking. She succeeded in motivating me to re-think the direction of these posts because as a result of our conversation I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions. Questions for which my answers lean more toward opinion rather than well researched, clear and rational understanding.

I’m not liking this about myself. I may be able to defend my opinions with well chosen rhetoric, but that’s not good enough. Rhetoric isn’t reason. Rhetoric may support it, but it isn’t a very good replacement.

Here’s the thing. I’m a freedom lover, an advocate for liberty. I’m very much aligned with the “Leave us alone” crowd. The question that most stimulated me after my discussion with my friend was: “Am I a liberty advocate based on the principles advanced by America’s Founding Fathers, or because I’m an independent cuss who simply wants to do as he pleases?”

Other questions I’ve been playing with are:

1. What, exactly, were the principles upon which our Founding Fathers based the Constitution?
2. Is the Constitution really a “living document” meant to change with the times, or is it rooted in universal principles that never change regardless of current circumstances? Can we know the answer to this for certain?
3. What does the Constitution actually advance in terms of personal liberties?
4. What is my responsibility to my neighbor? Am I my brothers keeper? How should this play out? Should it be coerced by politicians, or should it be voluntarily pursued by those interested in helping the helpless?
5. What does it mean for a politician to take “the oath of office”?
6. What responsibilities does it place upon his or her shoulders?
7. What happens when a politician violates that oath? Is it treasonous behavior worthy of impeachment? What actually constitutes a violation of that oath?

I could go on and on about the questions I’ve been thinking about over the last few days, but I’ve listed enough for you to get the idea.

If I’m brutally honest with myself, then I have to admit that I chose to become an advocate for liberty more out of my passion for independence, than from any well-reasoned examination of principle. I don’t like to admit that, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it to be true.

As a result, I’ve decided to accept the challenge to move from a passionate opinion to a reasoned belief in principle, regardless of where that leads me. Once again, I must emphasize that I do not want this to become a Democrat vs. Republican issue. Or a Conservative vs. Liberal thing. I want this to be, as much as possible, an independent journey into the writings of our Founding Fathers so as to establish once-and-for-all what it means to be an American.

What this means for this blog is that I’ll not necessarily be writing a post every Friday. I’m going write about my discoveries and because I’m a slow reader and take my time researching and thinking about what I read, my freedom oriented posts will be more sporadic and much less opinionated.

The place I’m starting is with the debates leading up to the Constitution. I’m going to be examining the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers to get a feel for the ideas that went into forming the Constitution. My purpose will be to answer the questions I’ve been asking myself and to share my insights with you.

What I hope will happen is that you will join me in this journey and enter into discussion with me (in the comments section of each post) so that together we may discover and embrace truth and live and vote accordingly. I want discussion on both sides of the issues I raise, as long as such discussion is civil and trolling is not engaged. I will not tolerate any name calling or disrespect in the comments. None at all. Any such comments will be deleted. However, legitimate disagreement reasonably stated and well defended is encouraged. I really hope we can learn from each other and as a result become better, more involved citizens.

Picture by flicker user exfordy under Creative Commons License. Use of this picture does not constitute an endorsement by exfordy of the ideas in this post.

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