Not sure this is totally the right place for this as it also comments on a couple of CL threads (!?!) but why not, eh? Jefferson et al were students of the Enlightenment… this period is nothing less that the applications (or attempts thereof) of ideas from the Ren/Ref. Challenges to authority of both the church and state. The challenge to the church was the use of reason and science to require the squaring of dogma with everyday life; state by asking why, if the Greeks and Romans (old dead white guys) had a role in their governance, why couldn’t the contemporary lot? Interestingly enough some of the supporting rhetoric is right out of religious teaching… having the Divine spark and being worthy merely for being creations of the creator. Hobbes says we’re wicked, mean, bad and nasty, so we need a strong king to protect us from ourselves. Others just the opposite… we’re perfect and modernity and technology et al, mess us up. Locke, thankfully moderates and writes[sp] that we are the result of what happens to us and that the gov’t needs to protect our Natural Rights (we get these, they are not given to us by the gov’t, simply by being) and if gov’t fails we can enact or cause to be enacted a new gov’t that will. In and of itself the GA was a religious thing, true… BUT… it is also the first grassroots movement in the colonies: NE to Georgia everyone was on the same page about a single thing… New Lights challenging the Old Lights: regardless of sect questioning was going on. How long does it take to extend that to the gov’t. Consider that many (if not most) of the colonists were because of previous run-ins with the State Church at home… an you may see where this is headed. So too the vision was that gov’t was to protect those natural rights (see above). Okay, let’s review; we have reason (from the Greeks and Romans), Divine spark (from the Judeo-Christian tradition… throw in Natural Rights here too: bonus for being creations of the Creator)… so far so good. Next the Parliamentary tradition (Magna Carta starts this), that is, the rights that gov’t must protect and does, more or less, since the English Bill of Rights signed by Wm. and Mary [shouldn’t Mary get top billing since she was the heir to the throne, not the Billy the Dutchman?) Given all this it’s not hard to see that the GA is important true, but just one of several pieces of the puzzle. Parliament meant to see to their (own) rights and over time by extension, to us all. Thaat leaves us having shed Britain and needing to get organized; why reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Given the Enlightenment thought was the big deal at the time, why not just adjust our organization to cover that, our collective religious background, and adding some fixes for the only gov’t pattern we know and trusted until recently. One of the English teachers at my school is working toward an MA and assigned an essay on this topic… we’ve not yet gotten to all of this in my history classes so this is what, basically I gave the kids so they had a chance… some bricks to with which to build their paper. They were to pick one and tell why it most influenced the American Philosophy of Government expressed in the Dec. of Ind. I’d waffle and pick all of the above for the reasons I’ve just outlined.[small spelling edit]