Title: Back to the Basics Original CoS Document (slug): [[https://conventionofstates.com/tx-back-to-the-basics|tx-back-to-the-basics]] Login Required to view? No Created: 2022-09-14 12:21:33 Updated: 2022-09-22 03:00:00 Published: 2022-09-14 03:00:00 Converted: 2025-04-14T21:19:31.882103904 ---- Constitution Day will be here on September 17, but the U.S. Constitution was not the result of merely a few months in the sweltering heat of a Philadelphia summer. Nor was it even the culmination of a year or two of realizing that anarchy results in despotism. The Constitution had its beginnings roughly 8,000 years ago when God placed a man and a woman in the Garden of Eden.\\ \\ This Garden was Heaven on earth; the perfect place where there was freedom of religion and expression, and private property was never even questioned—until God’s right to the property of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was pressed.\\ \\ Since then, the conflict between good and evil, and the various principles that identify one as good or evil, have revolved around the same basic premise: Is God our God, or isn’t He? If He is our God, then we must obey His laws. If we do not choose to accept Him as our God, then we are free to live as we choose—and face the consequences. This is called Justice.\\ \\ If we choose to accept Him as our God, then there are certain rules, or laws, by which we must abide. These are called, in the Declaration of Independence, the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. These laws are primary in their nature, meaning that they are very basic and are used as the building blocks upon which rightful law is built. But never is a law right, if it is not first based on the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.\\ \\ Thus the principles of freedom—religion, speech, the press—are understood to be rights because they were instituted on earth and given by God. This includes the right to private property, papers, effects, person, a speedy trial by jury (even if you were at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021), and all other rights considered the “rights of men.”\\ \\ But this goes a step further. Rights are only as effective as the men who claim them. Rights are real enough, and no amount of denial or death will make them any less true or realistic, but they are invaluable unless we are willing to claim them, and stand up for them. This is more than just an emotional adherence to a glorious idea, bathed in blood and fire, glistening in the light glancing from an unsheathed sword, and carried on the notes of an anthem that boils the blood in the veins until one cannot stand still. These things have their time and place. But they are not where or how the majority of battles are won.\\ \\ Most of the battles on this old earth are won quietly, either in the midnight hour, when most of your comrades are asleep, or in the early dawn when the birds are the only other creatures stirring. These battles are not won on the foaming crest of glory’s wave, they are won in quiet, faithful duty to what is right. There is usually some mud, some cold, a little dried blood, and a whole lot of tears. But that is the definition of duty: faithfulness to a cause when all emotional draw to that cause is dead and gone. It is duty that continues to put one foot in front of the other: duty to God, to country, to family, to what is right.\\ \\ If we believe that God created the principles that created America, then our duty to America is also our duty to God. It is a duty that we can shirk, but we must pay the piper for it. It is a duty that may cost us much—it has cost others their lives—but that doesn’t change the fact that it is still ours.\\ \\ May God find us no less ready and willing to uphold our banner for righteousness and freedom this Constitution Day than He found our Forefathers in 1787.