Hello Walter,
Consider the Bible. It's long and complicated, and by careful examination of it you can find a verse here and there to justify *any* behavior.
This is true of any long document if you are willing to string together enough quotes and ignore enough of it. I'd bet you could get the Declaration of Intendance out of Playboy if you wanted to.
D is complicated, and is founded on principles that are not orthogonal - they are often at odds with each other. Any attempt to take one particular aspect of D's behavior and use it as a rule to impose elsewhere is surely doomed to conflict with some other rule. The only reasonable way forward is to evaluate each idea not only in terms of all of D's principles, but also on its own merits, and throw in one's best judgment. Nearly a decade with D has now shown that some ideas and choices were dead wrong, but others were more right than I even dreamed <g>.
You sort of tangentially hit what I think is the key to avoiding creating meaning out of whole cloth; take the document as a whole, look for themes and trends (any document worth reading will have them), use them to answer your questions.
