In what ideas and beliefs is the spirit of the Fourth of July, Independence Day, ordered liberty, and the rights of men rooted?

With due respect for those championing that root as "Scottish Common Sense Realism," or SCSR for short, as we consider many as friends, this SCRM most certainly was not the root of that good tree. Rather, SCSR was one of the first vines that arose to strangle the tree of liberty.

This can be proven in three distinct and damning ways. The first two of these proofs is rooted in the internal logic and consequences of ideas, and in the character of the "fathers" of SCSR. The "fathers" of SCSR were all, by confession, Presbyterian - more than mere Congregants, many were ordained ministers ("Shepherds" and "Elders" by Scriptural standards). As such they stood on the shoulders of giants of the faith, and of the Scottish Reformation, such as John Knox.

The first principle of the Reformation, generally, and Scottish Reformation, particularly, was Sola Scriptura: Scripture, alone, is God-breathed, inerrant, and the standard by which all else is measured. As such, Reformers, generally, and Scottish Reformers such as John Knox, particularly, wholly rejected the manmade, Pagan philosophy of Aristotle, the importation of this philosophy by Aquinas, and the Scholastics broadly. Put plainly, Natural Law cannot coexist with the Reformed doctrine of Sola Scriptura. It was on the doctrines and works of these Reformers, not of SCSR apostasy, that the virtues of ordered liberty, government-subordinated-to-God, spheres theology, and the earnest pursuit of His blessings over the nation "who's God is Yahweh" stood.

This doctrine of Sola Scriptura was foundational to the Presbyterian, Reformed faith the SCSR proponents, such as Reid, paid lip service to, but they did so while knowingly undermining this cornerstone doctrine with the importation of Scholastic Natural Law, and the outright rejection of the plain language of Scripture. His Word is overwhelmingly clear that it is God's Law, not man's reason, that is a firm foundation for our lives.

Why did they do this? Because they were concerned not with keeping the faith for which those just 150-years prior had died Martyrs, but rather with synthesizing the Scottish Enlightenment - arising in the aftermath of the Scottish Reformation, which swept Europe with it's "enlightened" ideas tied, largely, to esotericism and Romanticism - and Greek philosophies with their bequeathed Presbyterian faith and culture.

In other words, the SCSR founders character can be seen in contrasting what they professed with their mouth - the faith of their fathers - with their deeds as they actively undermined their profession. This ought to be seen as damning, as the foundations of SCSR do not lie in the moral fortitude of those such as Knox and the Martyrs, but in the subterfuge of liars who knowingly perverted their faith.

The internal logic of the overturning of Sola Scriptura in favor of SCSR during the Scottish Enlightenment was that of unmooring a ship in harbor during a storm. What once was guided by His Word and the limited number of reasonable alternative interpretations of that universally accessible Word was now guided by the infinitely possible paths of gnosis, as people began to turn inward to interpret their autonomous moral code - subject, fully of course, to the Scripturally-documented propensity of man to lie to even himself to excuse his sin.

The third proof arises in the timeline of events that aligns with the rise of SCSR and the Scottish Enlightenment that was immediately proceeded by moral degradation, the abandonment of God's Law and substitution with mans autonomy, and the uninterrupted slide into precisely what Scotland has become today.

This same timeline was mirrored in America. Even by the time of the Founding Fathers some of them, and a significant slice of the culture, had abandoned the bequeathed good order and virtue of the Puritan Faith (itself hugely influenced by the Scottish Reformation, not SCSR) of their fathers in syncretism with "enlightenment" ideals. They, like the Scottish before them, had handed to them a society formed by a moral order as ordained by the Lord Himself, but in their rejection of His Word as the sole basis for their law they set us off on an unsure foundation.

Nonetheless, the founders of America retained enough of the foundational basis of this faith of their fathers within our founding documents to slow the decaying march of esoteric enlightenment ideas - such explains our more limited and slower slide into abject tyranny as compared to the Scots. However, we do now see what the ultimate result is of rejecting His Law for our own, as derived through the gnostic sense of "Natural Law," wherein the moral order is sought not in His Good Book, but by divination of the intellect, as though contacting the mind of God directly in interacting with His creation.

Prophesy that mankind is made to and capable of comprehending Him through all that is around us is not something you will not find a basis for in His Scriptures. It is something for which you must turn to the Greeks for support of, and there's a reason their empire is no longer with us today.