Their self esteem cannot be artifically inflated, this can only come from true achievement.

Mark Wilensky,
author of “The Elementary Common Sense of Thomas Paine: An Interactive Adaptation for All Ages”
http://www.NewCommonSenseBook.com

I have suspected for some time that the “all men are created equal” part of the Declaration of Independence was a denunciation of the right-wing institution of a privileged, hereditary nobility rather than an espousement of the leftist goal of “racial equality,” i.e., giving preferences to a minority which largely rejects the traditional American values Mr. Brewton describes herein and a significant portion of which is an unassimilable ethic group that is being used by the Left for purposes of ethnic balkanization.

It is really disappointing to read Barry Goldwater’s praise of the Puritans. Daniel J. Flynn’s “A Conservative History of the American Left” makes it clear that the American Left, which shared the views of Tom Paine, sprung forth from New England Puritanism. This is even worse given that Goldwater defended Bill Clinton, a man who supported the Communist victory in Indochina and shared Tom Paine’s views, against the puritanical so-called Religious Right. At that point one could say that the conservative lost his conscience.

A revolutionary can be determined as glorious or despicable depending upon the cause and the particular viewpoint from which it is judged.

I now see Paine, in his one lifetime, as both.

At last someone puts Thomas Paine in his correct historical perspective.

Although I agree that Paine has had an influence on the 20th and indeed the early 21st century mind-set, I would rank Jeremy Bentham as a far greater malevolent force.

As I am sure you know, both these gentlemen lived and wrote at about the same time. But, to my mind, Bentham’s Utilitarian principle – that human beings are ‘governed’ by the lust for pleasure – has outlived Paine; and is the foundation of the modern Liberal Fundamentalist state.

Emmanuel Kant, with his “Categorical Imperative,” did try to give some substance to the nonsense espoused by the likes of Bentham and the French ‘rationalists,’ but unfortunately made his arguments so cumbersome that he has been confined to the cloisters of academic pontificating.

Nevertheless, I think this quote from Kant fits quite well with your analysis:

“But [man] is not so completely an animal as to be indifferent to what reason says on its own account, and to use it merely as an instrument for the satisfaction of his wants as a sensible being. For the possession of reason would not raise his worth above that of the brutes, if it is to serve him only for the same purpose that instinct serves in them; it would in that case be only a particular method which nature had employed to equip man for the same ends for which it has qualified brutes, without qualifying him for any higher purpose.”

Unfortunately, Kant couldn’t offer up any real alternative to the Utilitarian ethic.

As Schweitzer said: “On the whole [Kant] does nothing more than put the current utilitarian ethics under the protectorate of the Categorical Imperative. Behind a magnificent façade he constructs a block of tenements.”

And that essentially is what we have in the modern Liberal Fundamentalist state – in Europe and the United States – a block of tenements!

Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com