Two hundred and thirty-six years later, he's been proven right.  What we celebrate on July 4th was not just the birth of a new nation but a new idea-an idea as bright and luminous as the firework displays we watch exploding across the night sky.   

It's contained in the words of the Declaration which seem the most familiar, but whose deeper meaning sometimes gets lost.  

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."

The concept of divinely endowed rights was nothing new in 1776. It was the word "unalienable" that was explosive.  On the surface, it simply reminds us that the rights we're given by our Creator can't be legitimately taken away by tyrants or dictators.  

But the use of the word was, and is, more radical than that. In the eighteenth century unalienable property was something that couldn't be sold or even given away.