Along side early Rome, America is the greatest model of an internally peaceful and internationally powerful Republic the world has ever seen. My MA is in Ancient History and I'm a "fanatical" student of Greece and Rome...and your "list" is a great recitation of the tremendous accomplishments of the very Pagans who were the first great proponents of the concepts of Democracy, Morality and Reason.
No one can expound more profoundly on morality than Plato, Cicero, Aurelius and Julian (the Apostate)...men who make Augustine read like a pedantic 3rd grader.
@Mesaclone That's because Augustine was a pedantic 3rd grader.
I understand where your thinking comes from, as Greco-Roman thought undoubtedly forms the basis of what the western philosophers call 'reason'... But in that I would point out a certain romanticized view... While both were successful enough to produce an elite class that had time enough to sit on their fat rumps and ponder their navels, both were also extremely brutal caste driven societies, whose underclasses and slaves suffered bitterly in order to sustain those heightened seats for those glorified asses. It is little wonder that both of these are identified as 'beast' systems in the Word.
As the West would have it, there was nothing but grunting and farting before Pythagoras penned his worthy tomes, but that is largely described by the hubris of our historians, leaning upon earlier works in the West, which were by every account, ignorant of history beyond that described by Rome, as the West crawled from the muddy and bloody depths of the dark ages, to stand once again... No doubt the educated classes sitting in the rubble pined for the Pax Romana, and forgot entirely that it had been imposed upon them at the tip of very brutal sword.
And yet all the truly great works in history - Those hallmarks of culture that many would point to, suggest that the Greeks were hardly the start of things... The pyramids put Pythagoras, Euclid, and even Isaac Newton to shame, in their construction, and confound the best minds all the way to today in their construction. And I do not mean merely the pyramids of Egypt, but the pyramids everywhere - And they are everywhere.
We could no more build them today than we could lift and transport the 3 sisters of Baalbek. It is beyond us even now.
Likewise in philosophy. Torah extends far before the Greeks, as evidenced in the ground, and contains all the prerequisites of a Republican form, albeit designed around familial patriarchs. Zoroaster likewise, came far before the Greeks, to name just two.
America, via the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and the British Common Law, is the natural offspring of Greek moral and political thought. Morality and ethics are not tied to any particular religious belief, but thrive when reason and philosophy are freely ascendant in a MODERATELY religious society...which is why we have had deeply moralistic pagan societies and corrupt Christian and Islamic states.
In part, that is true.
I have often said that an American Conservative's conscience should rightly be formed by civil-libertariansim in friendly opposition to the Judeo-Christian Ethic... And it is through that prism that reason can be applied.
But let's not forget which one of those two inherently marks the culture - It is ethos that forms a society, and makes it governable. not reason. Law is a function of ethic, more so that reason.
And vice versa, of course. That said, the kind of moderate Christian ethos that tied together the Founding Fathers, was an essential moral underpinning to our Constitution and our ensuing governance...and it still is. Should that underpinning dissipate, or alternately grow to encompass our governance, the Republic is sure to fail...a balance must always be maintained in which religious belief influences citizens to make moral choices without directly inculcating government with its particular tenets.
In that we agree, most profoundly, to the extent it can be done.
In summary, yes...America IS the greatest ever.
And that.
