You are right. Intelligent minds have only existed for a few dozen years. Nothing can be learned from the thinkers of the distant past (anything beyond 31 years, in my very personal experience). /s
No offense, but your ideas deserve criticism, if not only for the overtones of hate on religion & God. (I say this as a Christian athiest.)
Yes. Thanks for respectful reply. (Contrasting the deleted, hateful comments.)
I say it from a point of indoctrination. I have felt "God", just as I was sure Santa existed. I can never rid myself of the past, where I thought the Christian God was the only truth.
and... yes, it is partly meant to be tongue in cheek. :)
I was critcizing the hatred. The object of the hate is unimportant. Drop the emotion and share the logic. The OP's entire rant was an unfounded strawman attack on religion.
> I was critcizing the hatred. The object of the hate is unimportant. Drop the emotion and share the logic. The OP's entire rant was an unfounded strawman attack on religion.
No it wasn't. That was a side point. The main point was that the constitution isn't Gospel -- we can change it and shouldn't treat it as perfect.
There is no reason when it comes to worshiping imaginary beings or hero worshiping people like Jesus Christ. That's not the home of reason, and no my "rant" was not an unfounded straw-man attack on religion. My "rant" was a pretty well founded "rant" on the basis of God or other founding myths used to try to control people with real power.
It's not about intelligent minds, sure they were intelligent enough to reason about certain things from the political bias of rich white men about the stuff going on in their lives in the 1700s; for example gun rights. It's about the relevance of any idea and their implications. And running entires societies and systems on the basis of principles created by men who have very little do with most of the people around today. And holding those ideas as the hallmark of society is a bit much.
Scientific (and to a lesser degree, philosophical) understanding of these drivers has changed significantly, though. Further, the breadth of actions available has increased dramatically with technology, and as such it is reasonable to revisit some of the decisions made 200+ years ago from time to time.
I think it's enough that we have more "known knowns" now than 200 years ago. We have an insane amount of knowledge that wasn't available then.
We have neurology, neurochemistry, neuropsychology, etc. to help us understand human motivations and behaviors.
We have evolution to explain human origins, and evolutionary psychology, while very much in its early stages, to identify the origins of behaviors.
We have physics, materialism, and philosophy to suggest the lack of dualistic free will, which completely alters the way we should view crime and punishment.
And for the unknown unknowns, we have modern understandings of statistics and risk analysis coupled with the scientific method. Bayes' theorem was developed before the founding of the USA[0], and yet still, 250 years later, is not well incorporated into law and political strategy.
So maybe what really drives people hasn't changed, but our understanding thereof really, really has. A lot.
Just on the philosophy point - Materialism as a philosophical subject was developed well before 1779, and was a major argument during the enlightenment so would have been understood by a lot of the constitutional convention.
