The men that drafted the United States Constitution acknowledged that human government eventually degenerates into tyranny apart from three related sources of law. The concept of natural law stems from the recognition that everything in the universe, including mankind, reveals something of the character of its Creator.

The concept of natural law is foreign to many of our modern scientists, educators, lawyers and even theologians due to the fact that much of the modern belief system is founded on the premise that everything happens randomly and that reason itself has nothing to do with the processes that we observe in our environment. Thus, according to many modern law professors, law is whatever the courts deem it to be.

A second source of law for the Founders was the law of Scripture. For years, it has been conventional wisdom to declare that the men that drafted the U.S. Constitution were deists; i.e., they believed that that a divine intelligence created the universe and then set it to operate like a clock without any intervention on the part of the Creator. The facts show that most of the Founders believed that the God of the Bible wants to be known by mankind and rewards those that diligently seek Him.

The Founders believed that the Scripture reveals things that God wants us to know about Him and about how to relate to God and each other. People that declare that we “should not mix religion with politics” don’t understand the Bible or history or the Constitution.

The Founders prayed during their deliberations, quoted the Scripture and made reference to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. Such phrases have a distinguished pedigree and were very familiar to men like Thomas Jefferson who had studied the common law of England via Blackstone, Coke and Bracton.

Bracton has been called the “Father of the Common Law” who wrote a treatise in the thirteenth-century dealing with the third source of law referenced by the Founders; i.e., English common law. Most of the thinkers that developed common law principles were, like Bracton, learned in church law and Roman law. In the time of King James I, Coke confronted the King’s lawyers in an ongoing controversy as to whether the law was whatever the king says it is or whether the English people possessed inalienable rights that were revealed in nature, the Scripture and English common law.

The debate reached a focal point when Parliament raised an army to do battle with King Charles I during the English Civil War (1642-48). By 1776, men like John Locke and Sir William Blackstone had firmly placed English legal thinking within a system that squarely opposed the classical Greek and Roman traditions that dominated most of European thinking by that time. See the Ninth Circuit’s Nordyke case decided April 20, 2009.

Although God’s laws have been recognized from the earliest times in the history of Catholic and Protestant thought, the tendency to subvert Judeo-Christianity by reinventions of Aristotle and Plato constantly threatened to subvert freedom. Even the bargain that Europe and America struck with the slave traders was posited upon Neo-Platonic thought. Puritan bred New Englanders and their counterparts among evangelical English Christians made up the ranks of Abolitionists that fought the slave trade because it marred the image of God to deprive a fellow man of freedom.

Blackstone also acknowledged what he called municipal or civil law in areas where God has allowed freedom to adopt rules that deal with areas that do not have an intrinsic relationship to God’s character. For example, the prohibition against murder stems from who God is; i.e., the value that God places on human life. The prohibitions in the Law of Moses against theft are a recognition of property rights; i.e., that the Lord has placed some of his dominion (or lordship; i.e., qualities of sovereignty) in each individual.

A law governing the export of wool to a foreign country, on the other hand, cannot be said to violate a moral law. A law that would require the taking of an innocent life is a quite different matter than, for example, an excise tax on imported petroleum or tea.

But this brings us to a question to which lawyers and philosophers and politicians have devoted many volumes. From where do we derive rights? The concept of inalienable rights was as little understood in ancient times as it is by most of us today. The pagan Greeks and Romans owned slaves and could dispose of their slaves as they wished because of the belief that a man’s superiority allowed him to sell, sodomize or even kill his slave.

Human worth was relative to one’s position in government and the thinking of men like Plato and the other classical philosophers reflected an elitist view of society. Thus, within the classical/pagan world view, all men were inherently unequal. Therefore, the prevailing assertion that the Founders drafted a document that represents a stream of Enlightenment thought and/or Greco-Roman jurisprudence should be rejected.

From the time of the Gregorian Reform in 1075, scholars conducted a systematic inventory in order to correlate and unify every area of knowledge so that government and law and theology and science reflected the truth of God’s Word. It was during that time that the concept of property as a right became firmly recognized.

A right (ius) or dominium was also recognized as a meritum (legal claim). Over the years leading up to 1789, various orders within the Catholic Church (e.g., Dominicans) and Protestant theologians like John Calvin continued to recognize rights as rooted in God’s command to mankind to take dominion over the environment. Thus, man has a duty to establish good government, to respect other men and women’s property and to protect life.

To forfeit one’s own life by not defending against physical attack is not permitted except in unusual circumstances where the duty to obey a higher calling demands that we lay down our duty to defend our God-given life, dignity, property and freedom.

From the foregoing basic discussion of the origin of rights, it may seem like such controversies belong to theoretical study of ancient philosophy. The fact is that the same controversy goes on to today. Current events announced in newspaper headlines reflect an underlying discussion as to the character of American government and whether it should be more like European government. The role of government in the economy has been a big issue, especially since the 1930s. For example, there are controversies over whether it is appropriate to encourage citizens to defend their families with armed force while so much senseless gun violence is committed every day. The recent shootings in Binghamton, NY are a case in point.

Beyond all the statistics and arguments, we can say with certainty that, even though we live pursuant to a “social contract” where compromise is inevitable, certain rights are inalienable. We cannot enter a contract to give up (or alienate) our right to defend our families and should disband a government that violates human dignity by wantonly killing the innocent, including religious or ethnic minorities.

If this seems too abstract, then take note of the fact that the twentieth-century witnessed socialism spread across much of the globe. Whether totalitarian socialism manifests as tribal warfare in Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia, National Socialism and corporate statism in the midst of the Germany Holocaust or Fascism, Bolshevism or something else- statist ideology is one of the most salient features of the 1900s- i.e., genocide.

Natural law was often referred to as “the law of nations” and international law is still premised upon precepts and principles that have consciously been developed from common law principles.

Hugo Grotius was a Dutch lawyer who laid the groundwork for a systematic understanding of international law as a unified field of knowledge. He started with the recognition that inalienable rights are an inherent characteristic of man’s dignity which derives from God having created mankind in His own image. Nevertheless, Grotius compromised with the spirit of his age (and the humanistic philosophies of Plato and Aristotle that informed the Enlightenment). By doing so, he opened up the Calvinistic commercialism of the Netherlands to the evil of slave trading.

The idea that the Second Amendment means something different than what the Founding Fathers wrote when they drafted the Constitution is another aspect of the same controversy. The idea that the Constitution means whatever the courts say it means coexists with theologians that declare that the Bible means whatever individuals interpret it to mean; the Scripture, however, declares about itself that Scripture is not for private or personal interpretation- each of us has the responsibility to submit our understanding to each other, to previous generations and to what God himself proclaims about his Word within the context of all the Scripture. By the same token, when we interprete the Constitution we should look to what the drafters meant to say; i.e., their intent.

Underlying the “spirituality” of many mainstream theologians is a pagan escape from reason that says man must create a sense of order on his own in a universe that has no order higher than a mystic pantheism that cannot be explained but must rather be sensed by a “leap of faith”. Some call this Christian existentialism; others prefer to call it mysticism. To anyone that cares about freedom, the jargon of such modern philosophers and theologians are the semantics of incipient statism.

David Kopel has written an article, “To Your Tents, O Israel,” in which he examines the Scriptural roots of the Second Amendment and then looks at the Biblical roots of the men and women that made America. By removing much of this history from our schools, educators have set us up for tyranny. Just as the Books of the Law were removed from Israel until rediscovered by Josiah, we Americans need to rediscover the Scriptural roots of our U.S. Constitution. Read and then weep in repentance for what we have been so busy forfeiting.

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership (DRGO) is a project of the Claremont Institute launched in 1994.

According to a March 30, 2009 Wall Street Journal article, a network with computers in 103 countries targeted government agencies around the world including U.S. strategic assets.

Information Warfare Monitor, a Toronto-based organization, reported that 30% of the targets were high-value targets. The attacks originated from within China.

Researchers at Cambridge University alleged that the Chinese government or a group working closely with it was responsible for an attack on Tibetan dissidents. Of course, the Chinese government denies repeated “allegations” that it sponsors cyber attacks:

“The researchers said officials working with the Dalai Lama became suspicious that their computers had been compromised after a foreign diplomat the office had contacted by email received a call from the Chinese government discouraging a meeting with the Dalai Lama. They contacted security researchers, who started an investigation in June 2008. The researchers said they discovered the other affected computers by monitoring the systems that had attacked the office of the Dalai Lama. The reports were first reported by the New York Times.”

The U.S. Strategic Command, reported that attacks on U.S. military computers appear to have ties to China.

Malware programs trick a victim into opening an infected file attached to an email or downloading a file from a Web site. The emails appear to come from someone the recipient knows and may contain a file that recipient has been expecting, said Shishir Nagaraja, one of the authors of the Cambridge study.

The attacks result in control over the victims’ computers and files and passwords can be compromised or Web cameras can be activated at will. Keep in mind that it is unknown how many stealth programs may lie dormant waiting to be activated at an optimal time at which to impair financial, industrial and other communications infrastructure (within both the private and governmental sectors).

The military significance of such capabilities is impossible to over-estimate! According to Scientific American, the People’s Republic of China launched a series of network-based cyber attacks in September, 2007 against the U.K., France, Germany, and the U.S. See China’s Cyber Attacks:

“The cyber attacks against the U.S. stand out because security researchers have traced them back to the Chinese government. “Normally it is not possible to attribute the source of an attack, because source addresses can be spoofed,” says Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute in Bethesda, Md., which trains and certifies technology workers in cyber security. In China’s case, though, analysts tracked a series of 2005 cyber assaults against U.S. computers–dubbed “Titan Rain"–to 20 computer workstations in China’s Guangdong province, Paller says.”

The report cites strikes against the U.S. and its North American Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and the Baltic nation of Estonia’s information-technology infrastructure. The damage inflicted includes power plants and transportation systems, banks, stock markets and other financial institutions.

Alan Paller, director of research at SANS states:

“The precision of the attacks, the perfection of the methods and the 24-by-seven operations over two and a half years, and the number of workstations involved are simply not replicated in the amateur criminal community. Amateur cyber criminals do a lot of other things right, but this is an order of magnitude more disciplined than anything I have seen out of the hacker or amateur criminal community.”

Russia has also been involved in such attacks, even enlisting assistance from its citizens to proliferate and spread bots and other malware but “China’s goals are more subtle but no less dangerous,” according to the Scientific American article. It is well known in the intelligence community that China and Russia have been quietly developing the ability to conduct joint military operations for several years.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s report to Congress earlier this year analyzing China’s military capabilities asserts that China’s People’s Liberation Army has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks. “China is already engaged in cyber-theft and attacks against the U.S. and other countries that it perceives as its enemies. ,” the report says.

According to Jayson Street, an information technology consultant to the FBI and U.S. Secret Service, “The new Cold War is between China and the Western world.”

As the Obama administration raises these issues to a new level of strategic importance, North Korea has just declared an end to the ceasefire that downgraded (but never stopped) hostilities in the Korean War 56 years ago.

A few reminders are in order in connection with the “Forgotten War” now that hostilities have officially resumed. North Korea and China successfully worked together to conduct joint operations that engendered huge political, strategic and operational difficulties for the United States and the United Nations command. The Soviet Union and China were so successful in creating confusion as to how the decisions were being made to invade South Korea that historians are still debating the roles played by Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung.

The Truman administration made the decision to go to war in order to defend the U.S. position below the 38th parallel Korea after having broadcast mixed signals as to whether South Korea was within our defense perimeter. Because the Truman administration was politically vulnerable to Republican charges that it had enabled the Communist takeover of China, President Truman failed to act decisively and attempted to protect his “legacy” by blaming General MacArthur when the Chinese sprang a well-planned trap on United Nations forces as they approached the Yalu River.

The goal herein is not to argue the controversy between General MacArthur, his Commander in Chief and their respective adherents within academia. Rather than renew such a dispute, we prefer to suggest that themes that are outlined above are similar to 1950. The defense budget is being cut to the bone (Truman had also cut the budget and down-sized the military until U.S. preparedness was nonexistent). We have a President that is being called on to meet imminent threats with force. The roles of various nations are difficult to determine but there are multiple enemies (including the worldwide forces of jihad) that have shown an inclination to link up operationally behind the scenes.

Most of the U.S. public has no idea of how brutally the Chinese trap enmeshed its victims, American men sent to fight and die for a poorly defined U.S. policy. When the Red Chinese armies were discovered to already have enveloped U.N. forces, U.S. fighting men, many with little or no training and equipment, were already being mowed down with machine guns and mortar fire as they fled down the roads towards the South. Countless others were executed with their hands tied or imprisoned and tortured for years to come. Others died of the cold.

For months, many units, including certain intelligence officers, had reported mounting evidence of Chinese infiltration. Nevertheless, almost all of the accurate U.S. intelligence was suppressed; most of the vital information about China’s troop movements and intentions was filtered through a lens of partisan political interest at a number of different levels.

The Obama administration has just announced new military architecture, a command that will wage war in cyber-space. President Obama also should be asking his advisors, could we be living in a time like 1950 when most the experts were in denial as to the risk of China entering the battle space by crossing the Yalu River when the U.S. was unequipped,undermanned and unaware.