Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >> I'll just point out again that it wasn't the executive branch, but the 
> >> congress, that declared a national day of prayer.
> > 
> >   The first words of the first amendment to your constitution somehow
> > resonate in my head when I read that, causing a terrible pain...
> > 

> Yeah, me too.

  Btw, the attitude that Americans have towards their Constitution seems
quite strange. Seemingly they consider it an infallible and untouchable
holy scripture, and even the idea of going and changing even a single letter
of it is tantamous to blasphemy. (Amendments can be added, but changing
existing text, *especially* the original text written by the Founding
Fathers, is considered some kind of sacrilege.)

  This goes sometimes to such ridiculous extents as there being a small
controversy on whether a small smudge in article 1, section 10, is accidental
or really a comma. If it's really a comma (rather than an accidental drop of
ink), the sentence could ostensibly be interpreted slightly differently.

  It feels like the Constitution is holier than the Bible itself. Not even
a small smudge can be altered! Instead, lots of speculation and controversy
arise about what is it that the authors really meant when they wrote the
constitution.

  I don't understand where this idea is coming from. I have never heard
of any other country which would have such an attitude towards their
constitution. In most other countries I know of (obviously most importantly
Finland) the constitution reflects the current "state of art" in human
rights and the foundations of parliamentarian democracy. Changing the text
of the constitution is not something that can be done lightly, of course
(it requires, among other things, something like a 70% majority vote in the
parliament), but there are no qualms in doing so as needed.

  The United States constitution and its first amendments reflect the
"state of art" of human rights and democracy of the 1780's. The world has
changed a bit since then. It was rather obviously impossible for the authors
to know how the world would be like in 2011.

  Just consider the second amendment, for instance. In 1787 the most commonly
used handgun was a muzzle-loaded musket, which was very inaccurate and very
slow to load (the first fully self-contained breech-loaded cartridges were
not invented until about 1808, and eg. the modern revolver did not become
commonly used until Samuel Colt patented a revolver mechanism in 1836 that
led to its widespread use.) In the 1780's you could probably do more damage
with a sword than with a handgun.

  That is the background under which the second amendment was written.
Nowadays it's used to argue for the right of people to own fully automatic
rapid-fire weapons such as the M16 rifle or the Browning M2 machine gun.
Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what the authors had in mind when they wrote
the second amendment.

  The original constitution of the United States is an invaluable piece of
history, but where is this idea coming from that it's perfect, infallible
and completely applicable to the modern world, over 200 years later?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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