Now that we have established that the commonly accepted idea of rights posits them as free-floating entities that pre-exist humanity and are sitting in the ether, waiting for humans to notice and enforce them, let’s talk about where this idea comes from.
The US Declaration of Independence famously says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
This is very close to the definition I provided above with one important difference. In the Declaration of Independence, the source of the rights is God. The idea is that God – and it’s very clearly the Christian God who made humans in his likeness – endowed us all with rights just because we exist. It is our job, says the Declaration, to name these rights and then to create institutions that will enforce them.
What happens, though, when we take God out of the equation? Who endows humans with rights then? Who is the Creator? The answer is obvious. It’s humans themselves. It is up to humans to invent rights, choose whom to endow with them, and enforce the endowment.
The only destination of this journey is a war between different factions of Creators who want to impose the rights they invented. And the only criterion to determine which rights should triumph is the amount of force each faction can bring to this debate.
The Declaration of Independence is a beautiful document but it sets us up for all sort of terrible headaches in the exact moment where a very strongly mono-religious society stops being such.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams
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Clarissa, do you have a recommendation for a book that goes into the history of the declaration of independence and how it came to be. It is a beautiful document. I’d like to understand its context more than I do. But I don’t/can’t read as prolifically as you do 🙂
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Aren’t there plenty of human intermediaries between us and God? There were humans involved in us ending up with the holy books we have. I assume you have at least a cursory knowledge of the study of the Bible as a historical document.
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We are talking about the evolution of Protestantism. What was 2000 years ago – or even until the late 19th century – no longer holds the children of the American revolution.
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Right, but the evolution of Protestantism was also driven by humans. God hasn’t dictated new scripture accepted by mainstream Christianity.
You say having God in the equation let humans respect each others’ God-given rights. But the Christian God has been part of the equation for centuries without inspiring the Declaration of Independence.
Humans themselves have been inventing different rights, choose whom to endow with them, and enforcing the endowment differently while claiming to be inspired by the same book. Christians had and have wars with each other.
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The idea of rights was born during the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish empire. That’s when our modern understanding of international law began to be formulated. When Spaniards encountered the indigenous civilizations of the New World, they needed to answer the question, “who are they? Are they people? Are they as human as we are? Do we have the right of conquest? Why or why not?”
There were long debates on this subject, and it’s not a trivial thing. You meet a culture that eats babies because they are tasty, and you can’t just simply accept that this is as valid as your practice of not doing that.
There was a long journey from there to the idea that everybody is endowed with God-given rights. And again, which God? The Aztec gods clearly didn’t endow anybody with rights. So it took centuries to get to the worldview we see in the Declaration of Independence. It’s fashionable to turn up our noses at the Spanish Empire but it’s actually pretty amazing that there was a whole civilization interested in figuring this out and doing it so doggedly and often to its own detriment.
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You’re ignoring my main point. Having the Christian God in the equation hasn’t prevented believers in Him from interpreting the Bible however they need to to justify their actions. What you say happens when you take God out of the equation has been happening with Him in the equation.
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Christians by definition cannot see themselves as gods who create identity groups at will and refashion human biology out of convenience. The “just like” approach is intellectually shallow because it refuses to let in anything new that’s been happening.
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Even if you agree on god, you still have the problem of interpretation of his will. The original Dutch version of apartheid was created to resolve differences between Catholics and Protestants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation
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