Paradise Lost

The quotes in themselves are quite worthless by themselves. Also, most quotations
referring to something else, ie, one historian quoting another historian about a particular
point in their own references to some event, should only be used to support, not
be the arguement.

I agree that saying what the Founding Fathers said about this has nothing really to do
with that. What some are putting forth here is that the moral guidelines used by the
FF are, in a way, used to say that, they acted this way, and so should we.
This really doesn't work either, because as Mephisto said earlier, they lived under a
completely different set of philosophies. Although views on ethics should
could be used, since most people agree on a certain number of ethics, but
we'll leave those out of the arguement, as they're too broad for the very
specific and new problems of today.

But its' also not fair to say that the men back then who helped build our country were
in any way bad men, because of some of the things in society they did. Using Thomas
Jefferson as an example (basically because he's the one I know alot about) tried
serveral times, unsuccessfully to pass laws in the Viriginia Congress that made it
so you didn't have to be a slaveholder to hold position in the Congress. At least on
his part, the necessity of holding slaves made it possible to what he needed to do.
Whether this could be considered ethical on his part is not my decision to make.

So I guess, reading through this, it surely isn't necessary, nor at all wise, to make
references to the Founding Fathers in whatever arguement you are trying to make.
The entire set of 'variables' in our problems are remarkably different from their's, and
unless we're talking about general ethical problems, or philosophies of one kind or
another, there are plenty of other sources that could be used to support your
views - being that some old philosophies, for the most part, are considered 'good' by
a large majority of people and could help shape your arguements.

Also, I think that many people use the Founding Fathers as references because of the
grand status they have received over the years, mainly through crappy history
textbooks, lack of knowledge, etc... Now, while they did help to shape our country,
as said earlier, by others, the use of their own morals and actions should be left out
of most of today's issues - simply because of the dramatic difference
between their's and our's..

__________________
"Marino could do it."