how self-evident is democracy?

[gaelic cowboy]

In fact I find the idea that the people surrender their sovereignty through an invisible and undefined contract, which they are born into of necessity, to be quite tyrannical.

Could a person not use the same sentence about people having to surrender to a monarch, did you personally have any say in Elizabeth mark2.

tbh, you need to abandon the inevitable tyranny of such 18th-century atheist thought, and return to the real enlightenment, the golden age of the 17-century when God-fearing Protestant political theorists layed the framework for our political freedoms.

These would be the same intellectuals who were happy to construct and later work in a system that denied the vote to millions of people purely on religious grounds doesn't sound very free to me.

Try and tell Samuel Rutherford or Oliver Cromwell that the people surrender their sovereignty when they elect rulers over them. They'd have you hanging from the gallows before you could say the word "sovereignty"!

Hmm Rutherford and Cromwell didn't they belong to a tradition that was denied for a long time it's rights purely under the ageis of the monarchy

EDIT I am in a fierce Republican mood today what with the sitting of the 31st Dail today, and the election of a new Taoiseach from my home county