From the Foreword of Liberating liberty …
… The central theme of Liberating Liberty is the notion that the true Telos, the Cause and Ultimate Goal, of the united States of America was defined in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence as the common defense of their constituents’ unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and their Pursuit of individual Happiness, to enable them to attain and “live” Happiness.
In Congress, July 4, 1776
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Considering the fact that the authors of the Preamble held and declared that these unalienable rights were endowed to Man by his Creator, the Creator of Man, Who is commonly understood as being the God of Genesis, the Happiness mentioned in the Declaration cannot be understood as anything other than Divine Happiness or “eudaimonia”. And because it is also written in Genesis that God created Man in His image, and that God’s Name and His Whole Beingness may be summed up in the words “I am”, the pursuit of Divine Happiness must of necessity entail Man’s pursuit of attaining “Oneness” with his Creator, with God, in the Divine state of being “I am”.
Against the backdrop of this particular understanding of the Declaration of Independence’s Preamble, Liberating Liberty explores the many difficulties encountered in upholding the Declaration’s Truths in the political, philosophical, religious and psychological storms that broke during the 19th and 20th centuries. The book enunciates how Jesus Christ spoke of the pursuit of Divine Oneness as Man’s Telos and how this pursuit requires first of all the change of mind that He called “Metanoia”. Plato had described Man’s turning around from the temporal to the eternal, from one’s shadow to the light that causes it, as “periagoge”. Liberating Liberty describes how the various “murderers of God” sought and, to a large degree, succeeded to obstruct Man’s pursuit of his Divine Telos by redirecting the search from the eternal to the temporal, from God to Man.
If the cause of America is, as Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, in great measure the cause of all Mankind, it is the Divine meaning of the Declaration of Independence’s Preamble that uniquely defines the greatness of that “great measure”. It is in this specific sense that Liberating Liberty is an homage to the “cause of all Mankind” as it was worded in 1776 by the Founders of the independent States of America. This cause was and still is the First Cause that defines Man’s Telos. May this cause be the Concern of every Man, to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party censure, is this AUTHOR.
Vreeland, January 2024
