 Happy 4th of July. I wanted to share a quote by John Adams with you. I'm apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as a great anniversary festival. He's talking about the 4th of July. It ought to be commemorated as a day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade with shoes, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forevermore. You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and support and defend these states. Yet through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. Happy 4th of July. And for this 4th of July, I wanted to read through and talk a little bit about a portion of the Declaration of Independence. After all, today is the day that we declared our independence, which is very unique. There are other countries and like former British colonies, for example, like Canada, that never really declared their independence. And so, you know, it's not really clear when Canada kind of became Canada. But for the United States, obviously that is not the case. There was a very distinct date when we signed a document, sent a document to the King of England and said, we are no longer a part of you. Thanks, peace. Goodbye. And then we fought a war for the next eight years in order to verify or confirm that independence. The Declaration of Independence is arguably the greatest document in Western literature. It is absolutely in the top five or top ten of the greatest documents in Western literature ever written. And just for that alone, it obviously deserves to be read and thought about and cared about because it espouses some very, very important principles. And it also founded this nation before we had the Constitution, we had the Declaration of Independence. And so all of the philosophical bases for why we're a country and what we do, what we believe in can be found in the Declaration of Independence. So I'm going to skip the first paragraph, which is basically just saying, hey, we're going to explain to you, King George, why we're no longer a part of you. And I'm going to get to the second paragraph or at least a portion thereof because I really think that's kind of like the meat. It's the real philosophical understanding of what America is. If someone was to ask you, what is America? I would point them to this paragraph and say that that's what America is. That's why I love this country and that's why I want to continue to live here. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to read part of it. I'll probably put some text on the screen so you can kind of follow along. And then we'll just talk about what it means because this is an English that's a couple hundred years old. And if you haven't read it recently, you might be like, what the hell does that actually mean? So here we go. 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. Okay. So they're just saying, hey, this is self-evident, which means just self-apparent, right? Like this is obvious to everybody that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. So they're saying God made man and when God made man, he gave them rights. They're inalienable rights. You can't vote them away. You can't take them away. They just exist, period. Inherent to your nature as a created being in the image of God Almighty, you have these rights. That's what they're saying. Life, you have the right to life. You have the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So the pursuit of happiness, I guess that translates to something more, translates to something more like free enterprise or property. It doesn't mean like just go do whatever the hell you want to be happy. It actually means like an economic development kind of sense of the term. The most common term I've heard it expressed as is free enterprise. As far as your rights to life and liberty go, the US Constitution would of course go on to further enumerate these and explain these right. You have the right to freedom of speech. You can worship any God you want. We have the right to a free press. We have the right to gather and the right to assemble. We have the right to keep and bear arms. We have the right to a speedy trial. They have to have a warrant to search you. The government just can't come search you. And on and on we go right with all 10 of the first Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution being the Bill of Rights. So there's a massive, massive amount they say just in there. But they're saying, look, we have these rights. It's self-evident. Everybody knows that these rights are inherent to your nature as a human being because you were created in God's image. It's massively important that rights come from God and not from the government. Even if you're a non-religious person, you're like, whatever, Dylan, I don't want to talk about that. The fact is the people that wrote the Declaration of Independence were religious. Even the non-religious ones by today's standards were hyper religious. They believe that rights came from God, not from man. And that's super, super important because what that's saying is, is God is over government. Therefore, government has to be limited because government is not God. And if God is out of the picture, then invariably the government becomes God and they can do whatever they want. We see that most commonly today in communism, right? Places like North Korea or China where God has been, God in the generic sense has been outlawed. And so, of course, the government becomes God. I mean, in North Korea, they literally worship. I think it's Kim Jong-il right now. I can't remember if that's him or his dad, but they literally worship him. That's a problem. And that's what happens if God is not over government. Because when we're saying that God, rights come from God, what we're saying is there is an authority that has ultimate authority here over the government. And this authority has given us rights. And because this authority has given us rights, the government can't take them away. That's an important philosophical basis if you're going to understand human rights at all. 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 abolish it. And to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Okay, there's a couple important things that I just want to note. One is that the government is made to protect your rights. The government's job is to protect your rights. We form government to protect our rights. That's the purpose that the Americans, us, founded government. We founded government as an institution to protect our rights. I say that a million times because obviously in today's world, I think that thought is completely absent, right? Nobody realizes that's the purpose of government. And so we look to government to tell us what we can and can't do. And that is entirely false. That is not government's job. Government's job is to protect your rights, which is why people get super upset, right? When they start saying things like, well, there's a pandemic so you can't go to church or there's a pandemic so you can't have people at your house or you're spreading misinformation and you can't say this thing or you're not allowed to have guns. Because what's happening there is that the government is now encroaching on your rights. They're an abusive spouse, right? Instead of being the husband that loves and protects and cares for and provides for his family, they're the husband that comes home and beats their wife and tells the wife it's her fault. That's what happens there when government starts to encroach on your rights and is no longer protecting your rights. And when the government no longer is doing its job protecting your rights, it's your right to alter or abolish that government. That's what the Declaration of Independence says. And you can say, oh my God, this is extreme radical material and it probably would be labeled as such today but that is the founding principle of this nation. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that government's long-established should not be changed for light and transient causes. Okay, that's just saying that we shouldn't just change the government whenever we feel like it, like it's a big deal. And accordingly, all experience have to show them that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. I thought that was a really interesting line. It's saying that most people are willing to just put up with it, oh, it's not that big of a deal, it sucks, but what are you gonna do? Most people are willing to just go along with it and suffer under tyranny rather than do something about it. They make that observation that people are likely to do that, which I just think is super interesting and a good understanding of human nature because people will suffer tyranny for a lot longer than you should. But when a train, but when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces the design to reduce them to absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. When tyranny gets to a certain point, it's your right and it's your duty to do something about it. When tyranny gets to a certain point, it's your right and duty to do something about it. Again, that could easily get labeled as extremist content these days. However, this is the founding document of our nation. This is what we declared our independence based on, based on the idea that people have the right and duty to throw off tyranny and establish new governments when governments are no longer doing their job, which, if you remember, is to protect your rights. So that's all I got for you. I wish you a happy 4th of July. I hope that you go out and celebrate no matter what government official somewhere says you are allowed to do or not do because this is the day that we remember we are an independent people and that independence has been paid for with blood, sweat, and tears over generations and that we are a people who cherishes our rights and we know that government is our servant, government's job is to protect our rights and government's job is not to encroach on those rights and tell us when we can and can't do. Happy 4th of July. Do brave deeds and endure.