Liberals, having abandoned God seek once again to recreate him in their own image.
Well simply put if there are no natural rights then slavery is just fine. You can be owned by someone else with more power. Because that’s what it all comes down to - slavery being a “social norm”.
We have “rights endowed by our Creator.” I don’t understand why they have to change it to “natural human rights”.
natural rights - Rights given by God and reasonably apparent in the study of the natural order of society.
human rights - Rights apparent in a secular humanist society
civil rights - Rights granted by the civil authorities
Note the absence of God in the latter two and the authority of the last one. One doesn’t need God to have the last kind.
What this idiot is trying to do is justify the welfare state as ensuring basic human rights.
The prophet Mohammad personally set out one description of a community in his Constitution of Medina.
In Medina there were contentions among various religious groups over rights and privileges. This was a severe problem because each group: Jews, Muslims and indigenous religions wanted to dominate and set the agenda.
What Mohammad set out was a way to satisfy the claims of the disparate religious groups that lived there within a contractarian framework so that all might enjoy basic rights as citizens.
Many in the Middle East feel that the Constitution of Medina creates a blueprint of how to address human rights concerns: create a political or social contract that satisfies everyone’s negotiated needs and human rights claims.
Once this process has occurred, human rights emerge. They are negotiated rights and not natural rights.
Yep this guy is a moron.
As a bit of an aside, there are many people who believe that life began during the Enlightenment and its development, the scientific method. Generally speaking, I find that the people most in awe of the scientific method are people who don't use or understand it. Most scientists know its limitations.
IMHO...
This professor is the poster child for why our colleges are not worth attending unless one is majoring in engineering, etc.
His degree should be revoked, there’s a real simple reason why: his meanderings attempt to discuss the concept of natural rights, presumably those mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, he cites one author from 1955 and one from the 19th century and uses them to hypothesize that “natural rights” were an invention of the Enlightenment period, largely the 18th century, and did not exist in Europe prior to then. And then he proceeds to discuss Confucianism and islam, completely avoiding any discussion of Christian theology.
Whatever his beliefs are, the marks of Christian theology on 18th century European philosophy are obvious, and must be included in any meaningful discussion. In fact, the role of Christianity in appealing for rights in Europe was so foundational that this man’s blabbering would only warrant attention from a college freshman who graduated from a public high school or a typical U.S. newspaper; the latter would know his words were a hollow lie, the former would not.
Even if he asserts that his motive was pure political propaganda, his rambling references to other writers will ring true only with others similarly indoctrinated as himself, to believe in the deity of the intellectual.
Most troubling are the New York Times readers who comment after the article.
Most are ignorant of both history and logic, and of those few who appear to have some education, most view “natural rights”, God, or both with contempt. Hopefully they will learn about natural rights before they are denied them by an authoritarian government.
There is a need to spread basic understanding of how America came to be and the whole history of the development of it’s founding principles, starting in 13th century Europe.
Let’s look at one natural right.....the right to be alive....and how modern liberals see it.
Liberals want to place limits on life.....you can be young enough to be aborted or too old to be kept alive through medicine.
That should tell anyone that liberals have no respect for any rights, except those they bestow upon you through their good graces.
“Liberals, having abandoned God seek once again to recreate him.”
And not surprisingly, they keep coming up short. Smart atheists (I.e. Nietzsche) understand this. Most do not, or just avoid thinking hard about the matter at all, or stall for time and seek to prevent the issue from being discussed (I.e. Straussians).
So, to answer the question: Yes, if God exists. No, if God does not exist.
No amount of secular hand waving will change this.
Anytime the NYT argues for “human Rights,” you can bet a box of doughnuts that these “rights” will demean traditional God-given rights, increase the power of the state and cheer Marxist dictatorships.
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.
Old dead white guys understood well.
Some of your “natural rights are”:
To protect yourself with any means possible.
To protect your family with any means possible.
To protect your property with any means possible.
To protect your ability to independently think.
To protect your food source with any means possible.
To be FREE.........PERIOD!
Of course not.The world is a place full of predators. Humans who want to be free need to secure Human Rights consensually, and then enforce them.One must begin with a tabula rassa. Thats why we have a Constitution and an included Bill of Rights.
This idea of Natural Human Rights is a New World Order idea.An excuse for totalitarian government.It is a favorite meme of liberal fascists, who want to say that we are born with Natural Human Rights, and need do nothing ourselves to secure them, we just hang out and let the nanny state tell us what they are.Any right has to be cosensually agreed upon and then secured.The left wants to ram new rights down our throats and tax us to death in order to apply them to "all." Even to those who have no interest in either defining or securing such rights, who in fact want to destroy the consensual democratic process in order to create Utopia. Its a New World Order Crock of Crap.
Boylan’s arguments are at root, monstrous. For the corollary of his assumptions is that the right to your own life is a state-granted privilege.
We all know how that turns out.
Except when it come to "health care". Then it's a given.
Are there natural Human rights? No. Bluntly.
Read Blackstone.
Natural rights are the anchor on which our Constitution rests. Enumerated powers are the ONLY things the Federal Government can do.
Natural Law, and Blackstone have been replaced by case law. Man has become god.
The purpose of the article is deconstruction.
Next comes Hegel, conflict resolution.
But, there’s a problem…
My freedom will eventually infringe upon your freedom making you a slave; as your freedom will eventually infringe upon my freedom making me a slave; so we must all be slaves to the ever growing system (government) which mitigate away freedoms, so that we might be free.
Basically we must resolve all convict, but there is always more conflict to pursue, the conflict increase exponentially in the never ending pursuit of minutia.
But don‘t dwell on the paradox, it’s time to quickly introduce Marxist theory.
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