If rights are inalienable, they must also be eternal and immutable. The creator that bestows them must then, be likewise. It's inescapable.
As I said, if that makes sense to you, it's fine with me. But your conclusion is not inescapable, its arguable.
Where then, do inalienable rights come from? Who endows or grants them? What makes them inalienable? (i.e., why does the same premise apply to every human, whether or not he lives in a system that respects it?)
Its self evident to me that our rights evolved from our ability to reason, to our ability to apply the golden rule as a basis for a moral life. No 'Creator' is needed to realize that 'do onto others' is in our self interest.
Take away "Creator," from the DOI and the remainder of the premise on which this nation was founded crumbles.
Hardly. That's a hyped up opinion to me, and to millions of others who do not believe as you.
Millions of others agree with you and are free to do so. That is; however, the entire crux of my initial argument, which is when we lose site of moral absolutes, and the source from which they flow, we are undermining this nation's ideals.
I agree that there are moral absolutes, based on the reason of the 'golden rule'.
The problem is precisely THAT millions of people agree with you.
That's only a problem in YOUR mind joe.
You are free to do so, and our founders would agree that no government should pass a law which would punish or adversely affect you because of your beliefs.
Big of you to say so..
My two issues are that in this day and age, the atheist is using the force of law to impose their beliefs and that without a belief in a creator, one brings into question the "inalienability," of our rights and opens the door for situational ethics and moral relativism which is the tiny thread by which the entire blanket is ultimately unraveled.
Joe, that line may make sense to you, but please, read it again. I'm baffled as to your point.
I.e., The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed (unless they're fully automatic because too many mobsters are using them, or they have a pistol grip and flash hider, or they are over .50 caliber.....etc.)
Are you trying to say that my position on our "creator" somehow leads you to think I'm for gun prohibitions? Get real.
But you've yet to present any arguments....you say...
"Its self evident to me that our rights evolved from our ability to reason, to our ability to apply the golden rule as a basis for a moral life. No 'Creator' is needed to realize that 'do onto others' is in our self interest."
Many have "been able to reason" absolute monarchies, despotic tyrannies, etc. Karl Marx is viewed by many as a great intellectual, and "millions" have found his logic to be self evident. Basing the source of our rights on what we as humans intuit, rationalize or arrive at through logic is to put all human assertions on equal footing wherein what I think is no more right or wrong than what you think and what Thomas Jefferson thought is no better or worse than what Otto Von Bismark was able to arrive at through his logic. If the source of rights evolves from within a human, why did our founders carefully articulate that it had been endowed? The source of rights must be viewed as having come from an external (not necessarily omnipotent) but certainly superior source that is external to human thought.
By exercise of my logic, I'm able to arrive at the conclusion that 2+2=4. That's not because I think so; it's because it is an immutable truth that always has been and always will be. If it were contingent on individual logic, the person who believed that 2+2=5 would not be (and logically could not be) any more right or wrong than me; ergo the notion of moral relativism and why it is a falsehood.
"Doing unto others" may not necessarily be in our own interest and may even be at our own peril. Just ask the guy who dies rushing into a burning building or diving into an icy pool to rescue somebody (if you could ask them). Those things are done in direct contravention of self-interest because of a known and respected moral absolute. To use the "Golden Rule" in an argument against belief in a Creator is like treating a toothache with a jaw breaker.
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"That's only a problem in YOUR mind joe."
I'll respond to this one, with the second amendment issue as they are very closely related. Do I think your position on the Creator leads to gun control? It's a matter of cause and effect, but the two are ultimately related, even if unbeknownst to you, and that's the insidious thing about our nation's decline. You personally, for all I know, may be the greatest proponent of gun rights, the most staunch advocate of the Second Amendment and the biggest contributor to the NRA for the past 20 years, and if so more power to you. Having said that, I'll use another analogy to explain my contention.
First, by accepting that there is no Creator, higher authority, God, etc. one abandons a source of rights and values that exist or emanate from an arbiter that is beyond the power of man. If man is the measure and arbiter of all things all morality becomes relative.
Natural Law in essence dictates an inexorable bond between rights and responsibilities. Our culture has become entirely preoccupied with the rights aspect of this that it has generally abandoned the (personal) responsibility element. When it does so, government has an open door to step in and make everything *better* when things inevitably go south.
Many moral, patriotic conservative Americans are pro-WOD. The WOD is an abomination from a constitutional and moral perspective. The folks who endorse it are generally not immoral people and are otherwise very conservative in their understanding of the Constitution. Why then, do they tolerate if not endorse the WOD? Because they're otherwise frustrated with the drug culture and the misery it causes. They have tolerated the passage of laws that violate inalienable rights because too many have abandoned the responsibilities inherent in the usage of mood altering chemicals. Frankly, the overwhelming majority of drug laws (at least at the Federal level) should not exist. They do exist because segments of our culture have glamorized, rather than marginalized irresponsible drug usage. If the junkie / addict were made a pariah and object of derision rather than a recipient of government largesse, we wouldn't have had the outcry to make laws against his behavior in the first place. Moreover, a stronger moral stance and belief in absolute right or wrong may have led him to avoid drug usage or abuse in the first place. As it is, enough of us tolerate the legislated incursions on personal liberties to offset the sizable enough portion of society that fails to link responsibility with the right to ingest what they may. Furthermore, many people may never do drugs, but see usage as a "victimless crime" and turn a blind eye to the addict and the crack house as long as they aren't in "my neighborhood." When enough blind eyes have been turned in the name of tolerance and moral relativity, the aberrant behavior becomes normative and accepted and any problems that don't directly affect "me" become the business of the government. To not believe in an absolute source of morality (and rights) means that any and all behavior can be in some manner justified.
Likewise, abuses of responsibilities inherent in the right to bear arms have resulted in a sufficient level of frustration that has allowed the tolerance of the incursion of personal liberties. Hence, inner city crime does not effect those who live in the burbs, so we turn a blind eye to "Saturday Night Special Laws," because they don't affect us. Even those who oppose such laws because they can see the incremental creep, may not be cognizant of similar creep in other areas they are not as familiar with as gun rights. If one believes that the right to weapon ownership is not derived from some source superior to, and which transcends human history, defense against the dictates of conventional *wisdom* becomes very tenuous when that CW turns against the gun owner. Our founders articulated this as an enumerated right because they could foresee that had they not, even a democratic republic could potentially disarm it's citizenry (or actually allow them to disarm themselves.)
Regardless of conventional wisdom, the weight of the electorate, public sentiment against, and the hatred towards gun owners by government officials at the highest level, we have these rights that can not be changed. They can be infringed by a despot, but only in violation of natural law which derives from a higher authority.
Now, there always have been and always will be those who abuse the responsibilities inherent in their rights. What has changed is that there now exists a certain level of tolerance, and acceptance (if not celebration) of this behavior which used to be shunned by the overwhelming majority of society. Because communities no longer have the social weight to bring to bear against this irresponsibility, either through numbers or will, laws are passed to, in a sense, not impose, but take the place of a vanishing absolute morality.
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My two issues are that in this day and age, the atheist is using the force of law to impose their beliefs and that without a belief in a creator, one brings into question the "inalienability," of our rights and opens the door for situational ethics and moral relativism which is the tiny thread by which the entire blanket is ultimately unraveled.
"Joe that line may make sense to you, but please, read it again. I'm baffled as to your point."
First, the atheist movement in America is using the force of law and judicial activism to impose its beliefs on others who do not agree with them.
Second, for a right to be inalienable it must be unchangeable. To be unchangeable, by definition it must be eternal; if not eternal, the only conclusion is that they start and end at some point, and I do not envision the rights of man as having an expiration date. The rights with which we are endowed have applied equally to every person throughout human history. Many have lived in systems or in environments where those rights were repressed and violated, but the rights themselves never went away or changed. They were always there. If this is the case, the same, equal rights that every individual enjoys transcend the lives of individual persons and therefore exist outside of and external to the individual human experience. To believe that those rights have been granted to us from an external source is to acknowledge an "endower" that by definition, transcends and is external to individual human lives, historic eras, dynasties, etc. If the source of the rights is internal to the individual human, then the assertion of one individual's belief system is no better or worse than any other and it is in the application of this individual morality that we get situational ethics which is ultimately why it's *ok* to ban certain weapons, to conduct certain searches and seizures, etc.
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Having said all that, I will at this point indicate that there is a possibility that I am entirely wrong and that there is no creator. The existence of GOD, allah, buddha, vishnu, etc. is not what I was advocating. This entire discussion revolves around the assertion that the lack of belief in a creator as the source of rights undermines the foundation of our nation. The founding fathers may turn out to be wrong as well....there may not in fact be any such thing as inalienable rights or creator; however, they wrote the DOI with a firm belief in both, and it was that belief that became the central principle expressed as the justification for breaking away from England and establishing our nation.