Churchill had some comments that are instructive and almost prophetic on this topic:
"Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of States to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character." 1901, in response to a progressive book by HG Wells called Anticipations.
“Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.” —Winston S. Churchill, “Fifty Years Hence,” Strand Magazine, December 1931
"I have pondered the same phenomena in one of my own posts, although my own ruminations were over the preference these high profile converts have shown for high church manifestations of Christianity rather than, say, non-denomination evangelicalism."
I think one difference is that high church Christianity has public rituals. We miss those because they can remind us of our faith. Sure we can replace some of them with other rituals (lowering the flag at sunset as a secular example) but high church rituals link the ritual to faith and belief. Since my father was an Anglican priest I grew up accustomed to hearing him and my mother recite Morning Prayer and Evensong every day, and to attend Holy Communion on Sundays. Yes of course you can say your own prayers and you can attend a church and say them with others. But a more rigid format, saying the same words day after day, Sunday after Sunday, helps remind you why you say them
"As our saviour taught us, we are bold to say:
Our father, who art in heaven..."
Every word in that has meaning. And as you repeat them you can mediate on the meaning, can meditate on the sermon(s) where the meanings were explained and so on.
I think that if you are coming from a world of secular unbelief the rituals help to remind you and strengthen your faith in a way that unstructured more vague belief does not
Churches (catholic, orthodox), are about God and the community of believers going back millenia.
Non-denomination evangelicalism is secularism with extra steps. Rejecting the community of faithful to stick to the Bible, means making yourself the arbiter and interpreter of the Bible, and making the connection to God a "personal" caprice.
Some good points there. My concern is much of the “High Church” has left the faith and is condoning/encouraging sin. I would recommend a Bible believing church. In addition I personally believe that “The Lord’s Prayer” was a model, not a prayer that should be endlessly and mindlessly repeated. Unfortunately much of what happens in the modern church is mindless and lacks passion.
I think your premise that Christian morality is required for one to have rights is somewhat under proven. (If one takes you argument to be that Christian morality is both necessary and sufficient for rights to exist than it is false on its face; the Magna Carta demonstrates that itself.) If some agreed upon transcendent notion of a right giver is necessary, yet not sufficient, we have to ask what then must be added to have a sufficient mix to get rights. Then we have to ask whether that new ingredient itself might not be both necessary and sufficient itself.
In other words, why is Christian morality, or a shared religion, necessary to rights, and what else is necessary to reach sufficiency? I am having a hard time imagining what that second ingredient would be that would not itself be sufficient and necessary without Christian morality (although a shared sense of morality might be required.)
I think I'm actually saying something somewhat different. I'm not really grappling with the mechanics of how rights are made manifest. I'm observing that the notion of rights as things that exist at all, independent of any man's preferences, and which superintend the prerogatives of governments, HAS to be grounded in the transcendent. If governments are subsidiary to nothing, then rights exist only according to the passing whims of whomever holds momentary sway in the government. I think what you're raising (I could be misunderstanding you) is the question of how rights come to be actually respected and enforced. This is important, to be sure, but I think my own concern in this post was prior to the issue you raise. Christianity - actually Judeo-Christianity, has provided the moral basis for the existence of rights in the Western world. I happen to believe Christianity is true for reasons I don't go into in this post. But apart from whether I'm right about Christianity itself, the very idea of rights is nonsensical and faddish apart from SOMETHING that is both transcendent and true. The U.S. happens to be founded on the idea that governments exist to honor and protect the rights of law-abiding citizens. (cf. the Declaration of Independence "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men", also Romans 13) When governments begin operating in ways that are antithetical to individual rights, they make themselves illegitimate. As I think you're pointing out, there are huge thorny questions downstream from this position regarding how the existence of rights in theory is made real in practice. For the American founders, I think they perceived that a government formed with the "consent of the governed" and which existed only to "secure these rights", was the way to go. Not sure we still have a government which is all that interested in securing our rights.
No, I think we are talking about the same thing, roughly. I think the difference is that your claim is “God gave man rights, so man has rights “ while mine might be “Man has rights.” I don’t think the notion of rights requires a sense of the transcendent to exist, nor does the transcendent seem to be sufficient for them to exist. That is separate from the question of how rights are protected and enforced, or even if they are. The question of whether transcendental truth is required for rights is asserted but I do not think proven or really even supported. Most societies have notions of rights, whether enforced or violated by governments. (I would almost say all do, but I am certain of most.) It isn’t clear that all their notions are based on something we could agree upon as transcendent and true. Unless one has a low bar for transcendent, which I could get behind depending on how we use it.
I suppose that is a lot of words to say in essence that rights can exist as meaningful concepts without needing to be granted by a higher order being. I hope I gave a little more clarity; typing on my phone at work is awkward!
Ok. To be clear, I think the issue of rights being transcendent is definitional, not subject to "proof" in the way you mean it. For something to be a "right", by definition it must be outside the reach of fashionable or ephemeral human opinion - it must be part of the fabric of reality. That's how I'm defining "right" in this context. We use "right" sometimes when we only really mean "social convention", or norms, or standards agreed upon by human beings. That's fine as far as it goes, but a man's right to life is not subject to the passing whims of his neighbor. He possesses that right irrevocably (with certain exceptions), which makes any attempt to deprive him of his life illegitimate, regardless of what any government or social convention says. Even if a culture decides, say, that female babies can be killed at birth, that does not mean that female babies don't have a right to life, it just means that they are being born into a depraved culture. A human being's rights, as I'm trying to define them, pre-exist any culture and are above any human judgement as to their value. If a society decides that killing female infants is the right of the parents, that doesn't make it so, at least insofar as how I'm using the term "rights". If our rights are subject to human revocation or dependent on human agreement, then in what sense are they really rights? To respond to your comment, I'm not trying to prove this is true. I'm trying to suggest that any definition of rights decoupled from transcendence is nonsensical and can never be universally binding. I'm not sure if that's any clearer, but there it is.
"a "right", by definition...must be part of the fabric of reality."
That is not the same as needing to be "transcendent". In fact, one could argue that is precisely the opposite of being "part of the fabric of reality".
"A human being's rights...pre-exist any culture and are above any human judgement"
Yes. Rights identify the actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others. And they exist because human beings are independent entities (aka individuals). It is the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind. It is the individual, not others, who makes them act. This fact pre-exists any culture and is not based on the whim of some Authority. Anyone who tries to pretend the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc is actually the foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc of some other individual is blatantly contradicting "the fabric of reality" aka the facts about human beings.
THERE (which is but the tip of the iceberg) are the universally binding facts which you declare can not exist. No society, culture, or whim can change those facts. They can only be ignorant of or ignore them - like the culture you referenced which kills female babies at birth.
I think you are basing your argument on a reductionist definition of rights. There are active rights, passive rights, objective rights, subjective rights, and even something known as "claim rights". The concept of rights is far more expansive than "actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others". Some rights exist in the form of obligations imposed on others rather than some action an individual can take. For example, there is a right to life, which is manifested primarily by an obligation not to murder. Moral obligations are downstream from purpose, or telos. The purpose, or telos, of any thing is a product of the mind of its maker - one might say telos is determined by the maker. In Judeo-Christian thought, the duties imposed on creatures by their maker give rise to rights. When people speak of the necessity of transcendence, they mean that the mere facts of our existence (e.g. our embodiment) is by itself insufficient to understand rights and corresponding obligations because those are inextricably tied up with, and downstream from, purpose. Some of this is unpacked in other comment threads on this post.
"I think you are basing your argument on a reductionist definition of rights."
I disagree. There is no other valid definition of rights. You have certainly provided no definition of "rights" here to contradict this idea. You have simply made declarations about - and added modifiers to - a term for which you have provided no meaning whatsoever. Without meaning, the statements which use that term are rendered meaningless as well.
"Some rights exist in the form of obligations imposed on others rather than some action an individual can take. For example, there is a right to life, which is manifested primarily by an obligation not to murder."
No. The individual's right to his life means he possesses a sole monopoly over his own life and his own effort. It means his life and effort belong to no one else. He and he alone may dispose of it as he sees fit. No one else may dispose of it - make any contact with his life and effort - absent or in contradiction to his consent. Not because he has a "duty" or "obligation" not to do so, but because the life and effort are not his in the first place. He is not the owner of that life and effort and thus have no authority to use them in the first place. BIG difference.
THAT is what makes assault, theft, r@pe, enslavement, and murder violations of the individual's rights. They are contact with the individual absent the individual's *consent*.
Consent, and ONLY consent, is what identifies the exact same action the exercise of rights or the violation of them.
Consent is what distinguishes boxing from assault
Consent is what distinguishes borrowing from theft
Consent is what distinguishes sex from r@pe
Consent is what distinguishes trade from slavery
Consent is what distinguishes asst suicide from murder
So you are quite incorrect to declare that murder (or any other such action) is *not* an issue of consent.
No that’s fine, thanks for clarifying. Could you please point out to me the sources for various civil rights in the Bible? The right to free speech, for instance would be handy.
Alternatively, there are other definitions of rights that are less contingent on cultural doctrine, such as natural rights (which term has like 20 different definitions I am afraid.) Stephen Buckle has a book that traces some of the history nicely.
In general though, if you define rights as “a thing what God gives us” then you are kind of stuck arguing over exactly what rights those are and where He specifies them. I don’t know my Bible as encyclopedically as perhaps I should, but I don’t recall any Declaration of the Rights of Man exactly.
Just now getting back to this. It would be awesome to have a concise list altogether in one place. Alas, no such list exists in the biblical text(although the 10 commandments comes surprisingly close). The Judeo-Christian idea of God-given rights is grounded in the creation first principles outlined in Genesis 1-2. Key ideas being that all humans bear the image of God by God's own intention, and therefore we have obligations and benefits that flow from bearing God's image. Dominion over the earth, reproduction, property were all things established as human rights and duties at the very beginning. This gets expanded upon and interpreted throughout the rest of the biblical text. (e.g. In Genesis 9 God explains that murder is wrong specifically because every man bears God's image.) Man's right to life thus inheres as intrinsic to being an image bearer of God. Because only God is the creator and therefore the one who is able to structure the created order, to give life, and to impose transcendent obligations, the act of interfering with another man's pursuit of his God-given duties (i.e. restrict a man's liberty) is wrong. So the proscription on killing, lying, stealing, and adultery that we find in the 10 commandments are all various prohibitions against interfering with another man's pursuit of his own duties toward, and blessings from, God. I think freedom of speech, and freedom from compelled speech, are also subsumed under the prohibition against lying, but also we see existence proofs in the apostle's insistence that their obligation to speak truthfully about the things of God superseded the desires of any government. Truth telling is a right because it is an obligation under Judeo/Christian teaching. I will observe, however, that freedom of speech, per se, was not one of the "inalienable" rights specifically mentioned in the Declaration itself, although the Declaration makes clear that its list of rights was not intended to be comprehensive. I don't know whether you will find that answer satisfying, there is much that could be said, but comments on Substack are absurdly limiting, IMO.
Thank you for that well explained and thoughtful response! I appreciate you taking the time.
I agree with you on the right to life being effectively the foundation for most of every right that matters. I want to say Grotius gets to roughly the same point from the right to life in the concept of "suum" being the person and their immediate stuff needed to live. From life property and liberty (although of a more circumscribed manner than many use the term). I say I want to say Grotius because I might be conflating his work with Cicero a bit along with a few others... I need to dig out Stephen Buckle's "Natural Law and the Theory of Property" and go through the index after work.
The speech example you give is particularly interesting; I have not heard anyone make that argument from the prohibition on lying before, and it actually makes a fair bit of sense. A novel argument regarding fundamental rights that makes sense is like finding a new Terry Pratchett novel, so thank you! I need to think on it a bit more... it seems that the crux falls on the notion of lying by omission, thus telling people they must not speak is compelling them to lie, but I haven't worked it out yet.
Getting back to the right to life implies other negative rights aspect, I think it worth noting that the right to life is almost universally present in human societies. Likewise property rights and a few other basic ones. Those 5-6 commandments that are not specifically religious are pretty universal human rules (maybe not the adultery one), and the variation in other religious/cultural expressions of those rules are not much greater than the variations among Christian expressions of those rules. (Although the tail outliers are pretty damned big... hi Aztecs...) Anyway, the point I am trying to make there is that the special sauce seems to be something from the Roman legal tradition (generalized written rules to apply to many different cultures and religions within an empire), the Greek tradition, which when added to the Christian gets you most of the way to our understanding of rights circa 1750 or so. (It's gone downhill in the past 100 or so years I would say.)
I specify most of the way because I think the "civil rights", the notion that governmental power is limited against the citizens, is a very unique thing, almost absent even in the Christian west. Nearly unique to Britain it seems, although present in small doses here and there.
In general, however, and getting back to the bigger point, we have to be careful saying things like "2000 years of Christian morality" gets us to rights all by itself. Most of Christian morality's history was pretty abysmal rights wise, just like everywhere else. Christianity didn't pop up and all its followers ceased murdering each other or having slaves or plundering their neighbors when it was convenient. It took a long time in the oven as it were for all the ingredients to bake into a state of the world where a citizen could stand up and tell government agents "You aren't allowed to come into my home" and everyone says "He's right, they can't" including the agents*. That would not have worked before say 1650 really anywhere, and really only in British parts of the world afterwards.
*Mostly... but as you say, enforcement is another question :D
Thanks for a great discussion, maybe having the discussion is as important as finding the solution. What are rights and where do they come from? In practice, we negotiate them, or think we do, and society rubs along on that basis. But that is a fragile basis to depend on, especially when the power dynamic assets itself between competing interests. Who then do you appeal to as the ultimate authority? The constitution? The monarch? Custom? Who - what - is ultimate source of authority - the Author?
Brilliantly articulated. Without God, "vanity, vanity; all is vanity". Without God there is absolutely no basis for rights. All that is left is chaos and the "strong" or politically well connected shoving their ideology/will down the non-connected/protected throats of the masses. Both "sides" and all politics are entertainment opium for the masses. Divide and conquer. The problem was, is and will always be the human condition; the human heart. No "law" or system can fix it. Without God, or His edicts, we devolve into murderous tyrants, bent on having our own will be done in the stead of "thy will be done". 🙏 Come soon, Jesus. It is a real shit show down here.
"Without God there is absolutely no basis for rights."
So, like all the rest of the subjectivists, you feel rights are just someone's whim. Got it.
Of course you have a rational argument to back up that feeling, right? So what, exactly, is a "right"? And on the basis of *what* facts of reality do you declare there is "absolutely no basis" in *any* facts of reality for rights? Or are your feelings the "absolute" basis for your declaration?
No, I believe rights exists because we are more than a cluster of accidentally assembled cells; we were made in the image of God. I am not a subjectionist; rights are objective as given to us by God including the right to life. Mankind has deep inside always known this and has always found a need to worship, long before Christ came. You keep using that word, (subjective). *I do not think it means what you think it means.* As a God hating athiest, you encourage any vulgar, murderous, violent and depraved behavior against others because without a solid objective moral basis for anything, then everything is subjective. Without God, an ultimate authority to whom we will need to answer, the Supreme judge of all, there is NOTHING WHATSOEVER that means anything. So why would rights exist or matter? But please, keep raging at the void. Trust me, when you die, you will meet my "subjectivity" face to face and all your raging will be shown to you for the idiocy that it is.
"I am not a subjectionist; rights are objective as given to us by God"
That they are your deity's whims doesn't make them any less subjective, sorry.
"As a God hating atheist, you encourage any vulgar, murderous, violent and depraved behavior against others"
It would appear the devil is whispering in your ear. Because your deity didn't tell you that. And you have certainly not seen me write anything of that sort of 'encouragement' anywhere. In other words, you are making things up and pretending they are facts.
Subjectivist indeed!
"why would rights exist or matter?"
Because human beings exist. And continuing to exist as a human being matters to human beings.
At this point, I will note that you couldn't even say "what, exactly, is a "right"". But you have certainly made clear that your *feelings* are indeed your *only* basis for accepting the idea of them.
"deity's whims". You did not address the TRUTH: there is no other objective basis for rights, other than "because I WANT to". My God, you are a moron. Get a life.
"there is no other objective basis for rights, other than "because I WANT to""
This is false. I have presented such a basis in *facts of reality* (as opposed to your *feelings*) in another post to this thread. But thanks for now *explicitly* admitting your subjectivism - ie your worship of whims, not facts.
Oh, and thanks for confessing the fact you can't even *define* the term "rights" - ie you can't even identify the thing your *feelings* claim exist.
> Because human beings exist. And continuing to exist as a human being matters to human beings.
And that demonstrates rights? How? Keep in mind not every human beings continued existence matters to every other human being. In fact, most human beings don't care about most other human beings.
As I indicated, "I have presented such a basis in *facts of reality* (as opposed to your *feelings*) in another post to this thread." Specifically, in response to Keith's declaration about rights: "A human being's rights...pre-exist any culture and are above any human judgement" I stated: "Yes. Rights identify the actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others. And they exist because human beings are independent entities (aka individuals). It is the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind. It is the individual, not others, who makes them act. This fact pre-exists any culture and is not based on the whim of some Authority. Anyone who tries to pretend the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc is actually the foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc of some other individual is blatantly contradicting "the fabric of reality" aka the facts about human beings.
THERE (which is but the tip of the iceberg) are the universally binding facts which you declare can not exist. No society, culture, or whim can change those facts. They can only be ignorant of or ignore them - like the culture you referenced which kills female babies at birth."
Now, I will note than NO one else here has even *defined* the term "right" here, let alone identified how that definition is valid or mine is invalid. And the problem with not defining the term "right" means they can neither rationally defend their claims about that unidentified concept, nor can they rationally disagree with my definition or the arguments for it, let alone the consequences of it.
So, I'll ask: do *you* have a definition for the term you keep using here - ie do you have a definition for the term "right"?
"Keep in mind not every human beings continued existence matters to every other human being."
That's irrelevant. The capacity to violate the individual's right to his own life and his own effort exists whether one believes rights are based on the facts of reality or the whims of a deity. As it doesn't change the supposed 'fact' of the dictates of your deity, neither does it change the facts of reality. All it means is that some individuals choose to violate those rights - the same way they can choose to act in contradiction to any facts of reality (or can choose to act in contradiction to the whims of your deity - ie can choose to 'sin').
In fact, that was the problem with Keith's article. Holly's complaint is that the people who were supposed to defend the individual's rights turned out to not hold rights as their standard at all. Holly discovered they - and most everyone else - held their own whims as their standard instead. Keith declared the only way to prevent this is for rights to be based on the whims of a deity instead. But, as he admits in his comments here, that isn't the truth. People can and do just as easily reject the whims of a deity as they do the whims of an individual or a group. In other words, Keith admits that his deity's rights beings 'transcendent' does nothing to prevent people from violating those rights. He explicitly declares that the ability of the individual to violate rights is an entirely separate issue - despite the fact that the wholesale violation of rights by people was Holly's entire complaint.
> Yes. Rights identify the actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others. And they exist because human beings are independent entities (aka individuals). It is the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind. It is the individual, not others, who makes them act.
And this implies rights, how? For example, if using my hands to kill someone else would make my life more convenient, why shouldn't I?
One day, it was, "Wear your mask, don't walk in crowds, stand six feet apart, you filthy disease carrier."
The next, "It's okay not to wear your mask while protesting; you're outdoors, and COVID doesn't work in crowds of pissed-off black people or Antifa terrorists.
I have two objections to make: first that it is not true that all relationships are reduced to power relations in the absence of God and second that Christianity is the only way we can derive our rights. For the first one, I would appeal to evolutionary psychology: in essence, many of our moral intuitions are simply manifestations of psychological "modules" which are activated in response to environmental triggers including cultural narratives.
For the second, I think there have been some decently robust methods of defining and arguing about the nature of "rights" by the likes of Lysander Spooner, Herbert Spencer, and Murray Rothbard which are more internally consistent and consequently less expansive than those proffered today. For a more modern take that I personally find very compelling, there is Patrick Smith's anti-subjectivism. To be clear, I'm not saying that Christianity hasn't played a major role in substantiating the rights we enjoy today — just that it is not a necessary condition for those rights because robust secular approaches exist if you're willing to accept relatively uncontroversial axioms.
It is worth checking out this modest video for a discussion of liberalism and libertarianism that I think explains to a certain degree how we got to talking about rights like this and an alternative which is fair bit more steady than the statist philosophy we accept today.
I think the arguments you make for deriving rights without an ultimate moral authority is without the power needed to establish their authority. There may be truth to what you say, but all these arguments can be washed away when a larger, more ultimate argument (protect your neighbors, 2 weeks to flatten the curve) is weaponised by the government. Without an appeal to the ultimate value and right of each human soul to make these decisions, given by God, you will lose.
Damn it all, your meme's better than mine. I don't think you can re-grow Christianity. As I put in my sub-hed on my article on the very same problem, "you can't un-dig the fossils".
As you might infer, I came to a very different conclusion. The problem is not that we need to go back to being Christian despite the evidence against religion. (Pretending your way through the rituals as Holly tried to do strikes me as particularly obtuse!) It's that with the end of the perceived "truth" of religion, we threw out everything that came with it. Dawkins came up with the term "meme" to describe the "memetic evolution" of religious beliefs - survival of the fittest, basically. Of course, the religions that advocate missionary work and spreading the religion carry on where the religions that sacrifice their children on an altar once a year don't! But where Dawkins (and the rest of the early-2000s atheist movement) fell short was in not carrying on that logic. It was simply too focused on making people see religion itself as the problem in the wake of 9/11 that it failed to recognize the other side of the coin:
Wait a minute. These are the most memetically fit religions. They're the ones that do the best at forming a functioning society. Why are we tearing down everything those religions built just because they're not literally true? Why are we throwing out all the morality that the religion put into place in our society? He's come to that realization recently, but he's bemoaning the loss of buildings and hymns - he hasn't quite gotten to the deeper issue yet. That is, I suppose, for the next generation of thinkers.
If you are, like me, convinced that there is no god, but think the loss of religion has damaged society, I do not think the solution is to pretend your way through the religion. I do not think a 5D chess masterplan of "a bunch of smart people go pretend to be Christian to try to convince the masses to go to church again" is going to work, especially when the lefties have spent the past couple decades taking over churches and hanging up pride flags outside of them to signify their participation in the New Religion. "Default Christianity" is dead, and I am thoroughly unconvinced that there is a road to rebuilding it.
I instead advocate for extracting what you can FROM the bible, the history of Christianity, the western church. What worked, what didn't, why we should keep the stuff that worked - and the underpinnings of it all. After a bit of debate with Von (https://vonwriting.substack.com/) in my comments, I hit upon what I wanted to say all along: this is Chesterton's Fence.
If you think the atheists themselves are directly to blame for the problem, I did a breakdown of the results from the largest survey on non-religious people in America to demonstrate why they aren't: https://theflammifer.substack.com/p/examining-the-decline-of-christianity . The atheists went from 2% to 4%; the big movement has been the "nothing in particular" crowd. I contend that they are two distinct groups and point to a variety of data points from Pew that demonstrate this, both in terms of demographics and with respect to specific questions about beliefs.)
We need to make the transition to a world where rights are independent of the lie of “god”. As individual humans we can break free of this lie, but as a culture we still labor under the boot of the God freaks.
“FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. We have granted also, and given to all the Freemen of our Realm, for Us and our Heirs for ever, these Liberties under-written, to have and to hold to them and their Heirs, of Us and our Heirs for ever.
IX. THE City of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities, Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, as with all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties and free Customs.
XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.’’
Remember this document written by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury.
What she did not understand is that faith is a GIFT from God. You cannot be argued, cajoled, convinced into it. I would implore you to honestly and fervently seek Him. Read the word. Pray. Attend services. Really seek Him.
I actually understand that perfectly. My faith is a gift, not of my own doing. But to say so sounds arrogant, in a way. Why was I chosen? I have no idea. I only know I thank God every day that I am. But not knowing what God's will is for others, I choose to be obedient and SHOUT to the world that life is only found through a relationship with Jesus. The rest is up to God to sort.
"The reality that she and the rest of us face, of course, is that absent a transcendent basis for rights, the very idea of rights is illusory"
You've just declared that, like all other subjectivists, you believe the individual's right to his own life and his own effort are *not* based on the facts of reality (ie rights do *not* identify facts about human beings). Instead, again like all other subjectivists, you believe rights are just someone's arbitrary declarations (whims). And you are simply squabbling with the rest of the subjectivists over *whose* whims should be worshiped.
In this respect, you are right that the subjectivist "secularists" have simply taken over one of the fundamental "Christian ideas". You now both share the premise that Authority, *not* the facts of reality, is what validates ideas. Talk about *rejecting* reality for illusion!
"if God is not real, then rights can never be anything more than contingent privileges"
Except, of course, rights are not a magic bubble which protects the individual from violation. Rights are necessarily "contingent" upon everyone else respecting them and/or defending them from violation. This is true whether one believes rights are based on whim or fact. So, contrary to your claim here, the religious/secular distinction doesn't change the "contingency" of rights.
> You've just declared that, like all other subjectivists, you believe the individual's right to his own life and his own effort are *not* based on the facts of reality (ie rights do *not* identify facts about human beings).
Ok, I'll bite. What facts about reality are our rights based on?
> Instead, again like all other subjectivists, you believe rights are just someone's arbitrary declarations (whims).
God's actions aren't arbitrary, even if it is sometimes necessary to treat them that way since unlike Him, we are finite.
By definition, your deity's every action is capricious - ie is dictated by nothing other than his desires, his whims. By definition, your deity's ideas and actions are not limited in any way - not by facts, not by reason, not by anything. Your deity's actions are the very definition of "arbitrary".
____
EDIT IN RESPONSE TO KEITH'S *FRAUD*-BASED PERSONAL ATTACK (BELOW) WHERE HE TRIED TO BLAME AND BAN ME FOR SINS *HE* ACTUALLY COMMITTED:
Keith: "[R4C's] game involves insisting upon framing the terms of a debate around his own idiosyncratic and peculiar definition of "right"."
Keith is the one playing games here, since neither HE nor anyone else bothered to provide a definition of rights. In fact, only AFTER Keith tried to ban me did he PRETEND to offer a definition of "right". And, of course, he STILL got it WRONG:
Keith: "Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality"
Keith's 'definition' here is a blatant EQUIVOCATION between the concept of 'human rights' (which is the topic of the article and the comments) and the concept 'what is right'. In other words, what Keith has provided as *his* definition of "right" is the ADJECTIVE definition of "right":
"1. Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality: do the right thing and confess. 2. In accordance with fact, reason, or truth; correct: the right answer."
Of course, the subject being discussed is the NOUN "right", NOT the ADJECTIVE "right". And, contrary to what Keith DESPERATELY wishes everyone would believe, they are NOT the same concept - anymore than the "bow" of a ship and a "bow" which shoots arrows are the same concept. Yet Keith now FRAUDULENTLY PRETENDS they *are* the same.
To repeat: they ain't.
So it turns out after ALL his personal attacks, Keith STILL has not defined the concept being discussed here - ie his EVERY use of the term is *literally* meaningless - ie Keith is *literally* saying NOTHING whatsoever here. His words are *literally* EMPTY.
In other words, Keith is *both* the one playing "rhetorical games" *and* the one NOT using a valid definition - certainly not "any normal shared definition" of a human "right". Put simply, Keith has engaged in nothing but the PROJECTION of *his* sins onto others here as his RATIONALIZATION for trying to ban me.
In fact, as he has amply demonstrated, Keith tried to ban me because he has NO rational argument to offer *for* his -undefined- ideas or *against* my ideas. He simply LIKES *his* ideas and doesn't LIKE mine. That fallacious Appeal to (his) Emotions is the *extent* and *entirety* of his 'argument' here.
Talk about WHIM worship!
Keith: "[R4C] insists on defining "right" as something tantamount to omnipotence in one or another specific sphere"
Keith is now an *outright* LlAR here. As anyone who actually *read* my discussion with Eugine can see, the references I made to "omnipotence" were in regard to the concept "ARBITRARY" (as in the arbitrary nature of their deity's supposed choices), NOT - as Keith FRAUDULENTLY declares - in regard to the concept or nature of "RIGHTS". Of course, Keith's *intentional* straw man - like his attempt to ban me - is just another way for him to DISHONESTLY *evade* (to RUN AWAY from) doing something he is INCAPABLE of doing: defining the *actual* terms being discussed, and then rationally supporting them.
Since Keith doesn't WISH me to post any further on his site, at this point all I can say is GOOD RIDDANCE to this evil creature who PRETENDS at following a godly morality while DELIBERATELY being DISHONEST and UNJUST. In this way, Keith is proof that - *regardless* of whether a morality is fact or god based - some people simply don't give a damn about morality (ie they will violate morality because they *feel* like doing so). THAT is what Holly complained about. And Keith has now *proven* here that believing an idea to be 'transcendent' does NOTHING to solve her problem.
The commenter you're engaging has been warned before about the rhetorical games he or she (I'll assume "he") is playing. His game involves insisting upon framing the terms of a debate around his own idiosyncratic and peculiar definition of "right". In my view, his rhetorical games are not really designed to facilitate an honest discussion but to engage in some peculiar form of oneupmanship. More specifically, he insists on defining "right" as something tantamount to omnipotence in one or another specific sphere. His refusal to accept any normal shared definition of that term (e.g. "Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality.") or that there are even, in fact, multiple kinds of rights (e.g. inalienable, civil, objective, subjective, etc.) makes conversations with him nothing more than a through-the-looking-glass kind of experience.
I suspended him, as I told him I would. I'm sorry I had to interrupt your conversation but I had warned him previously.
His position is one that has unfortunately become popular during the last century, namely that freedom requires one to act insane since if one is constrained by sanity, one isn't really free.
We don't say that a wise ruler human is "powerless" since he rules according to wisdom and not whim. If anything, he's likely to be more powerful then one who rules arbitrarily.
"Arbitrary implies something that has the potential to be otherwise. God has all his potential realized."
Arbitrary means not limited by something. And it refers to choice, specifically to things which can make choices (which is why asking is "one plus one being two...arbitrary" is nonsensical - the same way asking 'is a boulder's choice to roll downhill arbitrary' is nonsensical; one and one didn't *choose* to be two anymore than the boulder *chose* to roll downhill). Arbitrary identifies a particular type of reason *for* a choice. Specifically, arbitrary means one's choice is not limited by anything but the choosers own desires (whims, feelings, wishes, etc). And arbitrary stands in contrast to any and all other types of reasons for a choice.
And, boy oh boy, in hatred of the idea that your 'god' is NOT limited - ie is NOT arbitrary - did you go ahead and *completely* limit your 'god'. You just declared that the thing you worship is capable of NO self-motivated action whatsoever. By your above accounting, your deity has no Will of its own, but is instead completely determinate - ie your object of worship is no different than billiard balls. You've just declared your 'god' can not *choose* to act any differently than it does - any more than two plus two can *choose* to equal five. In other words, you just declared your supposedly "omnipotent" (aka unlimited) deity has NO free will whatsoever, because free will *requires* the ability to choose among multiple alternatives - something you just declared the thing you worship can NOT do.
Put simply, you've not only removed your deity's omnipotence, you've denied him *any* potency whatsoever. You have rendered your 'god' completely *impotent* - denying it *any* Free Will. In doing so, you've thus reduced the thing you worship to nothing more than Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover". Way to go!
PS: since you bring up "mathematics"I will point out that both rights and mathematics are derived from the facts of reality - ie both are NOT decrees made by a deity *apart* from and unconnected *to* the facts of reality. Both ideas are based on the facts of reality (ideas which are true whether or not one believes reality was created by a deity or not) - ie *both* ideas are "part of the fabric of reality" (as Keith put it) and, as such, do not require a divine tablet, carved by 'god' and handed down from 'on high', to make either idea true. They are both facts about reality, discoverable and applicable by man and his rational mind - no divine intervention necessary.
You and Holly and Russel and Ayan have each got your hand on something I've been pondering for a long time as well.
The problem with a "Christian basis for western morality" is that it's never been the case. Christianity has played a vital role in creating the conditions for western ethics of liberty, but it is not the source. It is, rather, the flux that allows the ethics--which originate in pre-Roman Germania and Gaul in our cultural history (they popped up in other places as well, but those places didn't contribute to the Western Tradition till much much later). Christian morality, per se, is more-or-less at odds with liberty, but its scripture have just enough wiggle room to allow it to serve as an excellent cultural binder and play second fiddle to pagan morality (which shouldn't be surprising as it originated as an underclass religion in a pagan empire).
The problem we're having now isn't that "secular morality is inadequate" (I consider the concept of "secular morality" a nonsensical one) but that secularism is not an adequate cultural binder once you step outside of growing metropolitan trading centers.
Unfortunately, Christianity has been dying as a cultural force for 500 years, and it isn't coming back, unless-and-except it reinvents itself at least as radically as it did when it became the Roman state religion or during the Reformation. Currently, there's nothing in Christianity with the potential to go viral enough to re-conquer the world. That could change, but it will take an extraordinary set of characters and some radical theological re-imaginings to pull it off.
Nonetheless, *something* must emerge to serve as that flux-and-binder before a culture of anything like the scale of the United States can be again maintained effectively. I tend to think that we're due for large-scale political systems to revert to decentralization for a civilizational season, but only time will really tell.
Churchill had some comments that are instructive and almost prophetic on this topic:
"Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of States to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character." 1901, in response to a progressive book by HG Wells called Anticipations.
“Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.” —Winston S. Churchill, “Fifty Years Hence,” Strand Magazine, December 1931
Both quotes pulled from this article
https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/h-g-wells-experts/
"I have pondered the same phenomena in one of my own posts, although my own ruminations were over the preference these high profile converts have shown for high church manifestations of Christianity rather than, say, non-denomination evangelicalism."
I think one difference is that high church Christianity has public rituals. We miss those because they can remind us of our faith. Sure we can replace some of them with other rituals (lowering the flag at sunset as a secular example) but high church rituals link the ritual to faith and belief. Since my father was an Anglican priest I grew up accustomed to hearing him and my mother recite Morning Prayer and Evensong every day, and to attend Holy Communion on Sundays. Yes of course you can say your own prayers and you can attend a church and say them with others. But a more rigid format, saying the same words day after day, Sunday after Sunday, helps remind you why you say them
"As our saviour taught us, we are bold to say:
Our father, who art in heaven..."
Every word in that has meaning. And as you repeat them you can mediate on the meaning, can meditate on the sermon(s) where the meanings were explained and so on.
I think that if you are coming from a world of secular unbelief the rituals help to remind you and strengthen your faith in a way that unstructured more vague belief does not
Churches (catholic, orthodox), are about God and the community of believers going back millenia.
Non-denomination evangelicalism is secularism with extra steps. Rejecting the community of faithful to stick to the Bible, means making yourself the arbiter and interpreter of the Bible, and making the connection to God a "personal" caprice.
if you are certain of your faith you don't need the rituals. If you are less sure rituals help build it
The rituals are there because the faith is not about "us", the solitary person, but our connection to others and the church.
If we are certain of our faith on our own, we might as well not believe at all...
The greatest saints doubted their faith constantly
Some good points there. My concern is much of the “High Church” has left the faith and is condoning/encouraging sin. I would recommend a Bible believing church. In addition I personally believe that “The Lord’s Prayer” was a model, not a prayer that should be endlessly and mindlessly repeated. Unfortunately much of what happens in the modern church is mindless and lacks passion.
expanded into a substack post of my own - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/faith-and-ritual
There are only two kingdoms. Even "putting off" your choice is a positive choice.
I think your premise that Christian morality is required for one to have rights is somewhat under proven. (If one takes you argument to be that Christian morality is both necessary and sufficient for rights to exist than it is false on its face; the Magna Carta demonstrates that itself.) If some agreed upon transcendent notion of a right giver is necessary, yet not sufficient, we have to ask what then must be added to have a sufficient mix to get rights. Then we have to ask whether that new ingredient itself might not be both necessary and sufficient itself.
In other words, why is Christian morality, or a shared religion, necessary to rights, and what else is necessary to reach sufficiency? I am having a hard time imagining what that second ingredient would be that would not itself be sufficient and necessary without Christian morality (although a shared sense of morality might be required.)
I think I'm actually saying something somewhat different. I'm not really grappling with the mechanics of how rights are made manifest. I'm observing that the notion of rights as things that exist at all, independent of any man's preferences, and which superintend the prerogatives of governments, HAS to be grounded in the transcendent. If governments are subsidiary to nothing, then rights exist only according to the passing whims of whomever holds momentary sway in the government. I think what you're raising (I could be misunderstanding you) is the question of how rights come to be actually respected and enforced. This is important, to be sure, but I think my own concern in this post was prior to the issue you raise. Christianity - actually Judeo-Christianity, has provided the moral basis for the existence of rights in the Western world. I happen to believe Christianity is true for reasons I don't go into in this post. But apart from whether I'm right about Christianity itself, the very idea of rights is nonsensical and faddish apart from SOMETHING that is both transcendent and true. The U.S. happens to be founded on the idea that governments exist to honor and protect the rights of law-abiding citizens. (cf. the Declaration of Independence "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men", also Romans 13) When governments begin operating in ways that are antithetical to individual rights, they make themselves illegitimate. As I think you're pointing out, there are huge thorny questions downstream from this position regarding how the existence of rights in theory is made real in practice. For the American founders, I think they perceived that a government formed with the "consent of the governed" and which existed only to "secure these rights", was the way to go. Not sure we still have a government which is all that interested in securing our rights.
No, I think we are talking about the same thing, roughly. I think the difference is that your claim is “God gave man rights, so man has rights “ while mine might be “Man has rights.” I don’t think the notion of rights requires a sense of the transcendent to exist, nor does the transcendent seem to be sufficient for them to exist. That is separate from the question of how rights are protected and enforced, or even if they are. The question of whether transcendental truth is required for rights is asserted but I do not think proven or really even supported. Most societies have notions of rights, whether enforced or violated by governments. (I would almost say all do, but I am certain of most.) It isn’t clear that all their notions are based on something we could agree upon as transcendent and true. Unless one has a low bar for transcendent, which I could get behind depending on how we use it.
I suppose that is a lot of words to say in essence that rights can exist as meaningful concepts without needing to be granted by a higher order being. I hope I gave a little more clarity; typing on my phone at work is awkward!
Ok. To be clear, I think the issue of rights being transcendent is definitional, not subject to "proof" in the way you mean it. For something to be a "right", by definition it must be outside the reach of fashionable or ephemeral human opinion - it must be part of the fabric of reality. That's how I'm defining "right" in this context. We use "right" sometimes when we only really mean "social convention", or norms, or standards agreed upon by human beings. That's fine as far as it goes, but a man's right to life is not subject to the passing whims of his neighbor. He possesses that right irrevocably (with certain exceptions), which makes any attempt to deprive him of his life illegitimate, regardless of what any government or social convention says. Even if a culture decides, say, that female babies can be killed at birth, that does not mean that female babies don't have a right to life, it just means that they are being born into a depraved culture. A human being's rights, as I'm trying to define them, pre-exist any culture and are above any human judgement as to their value. If a society decides that killing female infants is the right of the parents, that doesn't make it so, at least insofar as how I'm using the term "rights". If our rights are subject to human revocation or dependent on human agreement, then in what sense are they really rights? To respond to your comment, I'm not trying to prove this is true. I'm trying to suggest that any definition of rights decoupled from transcendence is nonsensical and can never be universally binding. I'm not sure if that's any clearer, but there it is.
"a "right", by definition...must be part of the fabric of reality."
That is not the same as needing to be "transcendent". In fact, one could argue that is precisely the opposite of being "part of the fabric of reality".
"A human being's rights...pre-exist any culture and are above any human judgement"
Yes. Rights identify the actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others. And they exist because human beings are independent entities (aka individuals). It is the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind. It is the individual, not others, who makes them act. This fact pre-exists any culture and is not based on the whim of some Authority. Anyone who tries to pretend the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc is actually the foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc of some other individual is blatantly contradicting "the fabric of reality" aka the facts about human beings.
THERE (which is but the tip of the iceberg) are the universally binding facts which you declare can not exist. No society, culture, or whim can change those facts. They can only be ignorant of or ignore them - like the culture you referenced which kills female babies at birth.
I think you are basing your argument on a reductionist definition of rights. There are active rights, passive rights, objective rights, subjective rights, and even something known as "claim rights". The concept of rights is far more expansive than "actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others". Some rights exist in the form of obligations imposed on others rather than some action an individual can take. For example, there is a right to life, which is manifested primarily by an obligation not to murder. Moral obligations are downstream from purpose, or telos. The purpose, or telos, of any thing is a product of the mind of its maker - one might say telos is determined by the maker. In Judeo-Christian thought, the duties imposed on creatures by their maker give rise to rights. When people speak of the necessity of transcendence, they mean that the mere facts of our existence (e.g. our embodiment) is by itself insufficient to understand rights and corresponding obligations because those are inextricably tied up with, and downstream from, purpose. Some of this is unpacked in other comment threads on this post.
"I think you are basing your argument on a reductionist definition of rights."
I disagree. There is no other valid definition of rights. You have certainly provided no definition of "rights" here to contradict this idea. You have simply made declarations about - and added modifiers to - a term for which you have provided no meaning whatsoever. Without meaning, the statements which use that term are rendered meaningless as well.
"Some rights exist in the form of obligations imposed on others rather than some action an individual can take. For example, there is a right to life, which is manifested primarily by an obligation not to murder."
No. The individual's right to his life means he possesses a sole monopoly over his own life and his own effort. It means his life and effort belong to no one else. He and he alone may dispose of it as he sees fit. No one else may dispose of it - make any contact with his life and effort - absent or in contradiction to his consent. Not because he has a "duty" or "obligation" not to do so, but because the life and effort are not his in the first place. He is not the owner of that life and effort and thus have no authority to use them in the first place. BIG difference.
THAT is what makes assault, theft, r@pe, enslavement, and murder violations of the individual's rights. They are contact with the individual absent the individual's *consent*.
Consent, and ONLY consent, is what identifies the exact same action the exercise of rights or the violation of them.
Consent is what distinguishes boxing from assault
Consent is what distinguishes borrowing from theft
Consent is what distinguishes sex from r@pe
Consent is what distinguishes trade from slavery
Consent is what distinguishes asst suicide from murder
So you are quite incorrect to declare that murder (or any other such action) is *not* an issue of consent.
No that’s fine, thanks for clarifying. Could you please point out to me the sources for various civil rights in the Bible? The right to free speech, for instance would be handy.
Alternatively, there are other definitions of rights that are less contingent on cultural doctrine, such as natural rights (which term has like 20 different definitions I am afraid.) Stephen Buckle has a book that traces some of the history nicely.
In general though, if you define rights as “a thing what God gives us” then you are kind of stuck arguing over exactly what rights those are and where He specifies them. I don’t know my Bible as encyclopedically as perhaps I should, but I don’t recall any Declaration of the Rights of Man exactly.
Just now getting back to this. It would be awesome to have a concise list altogether in one place. Alas, no such list exists in the biblical text(although the 10 commandments comes surprisingly close). The Judeo-Christian idea of God-given rights is grounded in the creation first principles outlined in Genesis 1-2. Key ideas being that all humans bear the image of God by God's own intention, and therefore we have obligations and benefits that flow from bearing God's image. Dominion over the earth, reproduction, property were all things established as human rights and duties at the very beginning. This gets expanded upon and interpreted throughout the rest of the biblical text. (e.g. In Genesis 9 God explains that murder is wrong specifically because every man bears God's image.) Man's right to life thus inheres as intrinsic to being an image bearer of God. Because only God is the creator and therefore the one who is able to structure the created order, to give life, and to impose transcendent obligations, the act of interfering with another man's pursuit of his God-given duties (i.e. restrict a man's liberty) is wrong. So the proscription on killing, lying, stealing, and adultery that we find in the 10 commandments are all various prohibitions against interfering with another man's pursuit of his own duties toward, and blessings from, God. I think freedom of speech, and freedom from compelled speech, are also subsumed under the prohibition against lying, but also we see existence proofs in the apostle's insistence that their obligation to speak truthfully about the things of God superseded the desires of any government. Truth telling is a right because it is an obligation under Judeo/Christian teaching. I will observe, however, that freedom of speech, per se, was not one of the "inalienable" rights specifically mentioned in the Declaration itself, although the Declaration makes clear that its list of rights was not intended to be comprehensive. I don't know whether you will find that answer satisfying, there is much that could be said, but comments on Substack are absurdly limiting, IMO.
Thank you for that well explained and thoughtful response! I appreciate you taking the time.
I agree with you on the right to life being effectively the foundation for most of every right that matters. I want to say Grotius gets to roughly the same point from the right to life in the concept of "suum" being the person and their immediate stuff needed to live. From life property and liberty (although of a more circumscribed manner than many use the term). I say I want to say Grotius because I might be conflating his work with Cicero a bit along with a few others... I need to dig out Stephen Buckle's "Natural Law and the Theory of Property" and go through the index after work.
The speech example you give is particularly interesting; I have not heard anyone make that argument from the prohibition on lying before, and it actually makes a fair bit of sense. A novel argument regarding fundamental rights that makes sense is like finding a new Terry Pratchett novel, so thank you! I need to think on it a bit more... it seems that the crux falls on the notion of lying by omission, thus telling people they must not speak is compelling them to lie, but I haven't worked it out yet.
Getting back to the right to life implies other negative rights aspect, I think it worth noting that the right to life is almost universally present in human societies. Likewise property rights and a few other basic ones. Those 5-6 commandments that are not specifically religious are pretty universal human rules (maybe not the adultery one), and the variation in other religious/cultural expressions of those rules are not much greater than the variations among Christian expressions of those rules. (Although the tail outliers are pretty damned big... hi Aztecs...) Anyway, the point I am trying to make there is that the special sauce seems to be something from the Roman legal tradition (generalized written rules to apply to many different cultures and religions within an empire), the Greek tradition, which when added to the Christian gets you most of the way to our understanding of rights circa 1750 or so. (It's gone downhill in the past 100 or so years I would say.)
I specify most of the way because I think the "civil rights", the notion that governmental power is limited against the citizens, is a very unique thing, almost absent even in the Christian west. Nearly unique to Britain it seems, although present in small doses here and there.
In general, however, and getting back to the bigger point, we have to be careful saying things like "2000 years of Christian morality" gets us to rights all by itself. Most of Christian morality's history was pretty abysmal rights wise, just like everywhere else. Christianity didn't pop up and all its followers ceased murdering each other or having slaves or plundering their neighbors when it was convenient. It took a long time in the oven as it were for all the ingredients to bake into a state of the world where a citizen could stand up and tell government agents "You aren't allowed to come into my home" and everyone says "He's right, they can't" including the agents*. That would not have worked before say 1650 really anywhere, and really only in British parts of the world afterwards.
*Mostly... but as you say, enforcement is another question :D
Thanks for a great discussion, maybe having the discussion is as important as finding the solution. What are rights and where do they come from? In practice, we negotiate them, or think we do, and society rubs along on that basis. But that is a fragile basis to depend on, especially when the power dynamic assets itself between competing interests. Who then do you appeal to as the ultimate authority? The constitution? The monarch? Custom? Who - what - is ultimate source of authority - the Author?
Hard to have “God given rights” without God.
Hey, great.
I need to read you more.
Good stuff, here.
Don’t quit on praying!
Best!
Brilliantly articulated. Without God, "vanity, vanity; all is vanity". Without God there is absolutely no basis for rights. All that is left is chaos and the "strong" or politically well connected shoving their ideology/will down the non-connected/protected throats of the masses. Both "sides" and all politics are entertainment opium for the masses. Divide and conquer. The problem was, is and will always be the human condition; the human heart. No "law" or system can fix it. Without God, or His edicts, we devolve into murderous tyrants, bent on having our own will be done in the stead of "thy will be done". 🙏 Come soon, Jesus. It is a real shit show down here.
Predicted in Revelations.
“The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must”
"Without God there is absolutely no basis for rights."
So, like all the rest of the subjectivists, you feel rights are just someone's whim. Got it.
Of course you have a rational argument to back up that feeling, right? So what, exactly, is a "right"? And on the basis of *what* facts of reality do you declare there is "absolutely no basis" in *any* facts of reality for rights? Or are your feelings the "absolute" basis for your declaration?
No, I believe rights exists because we are more than a cluster of accidentally assembled cells; we were made in the image of God. I am not a subjectionist; rights are objective as given to us by God including the right to life. Mankind has deep inside always known this and has always found a need to worship, long before Christ came. You keep using that word, (subjective). *I do not think it means what you think it means.* As a God hating athiest, you encourage any vulgar, murderous, violent and depraved behavior against others because without a solid objective moral basis for anything, then everything is subjective. Without God, an ultimate authority to whom we will need to answer, the Supreme judge of all, there is NOTHING WHATSOEVER that means anything. So why would rights exist or matter? But please, keep raging at the void. Trust me, when you die, you will meet my "subjectivity" face to face and all your raging will be shown to you for the idiocy that it is.
"I am not a subjectionist; rights are objective as given to us by God"
That they are your deity's whims doesn't make them any less subjective, sorry.
"As a God hating atheist, you encourage any vulgar, murderous, violent and depraved behavior against others"
It would appear the devil is whispering in your ear. Because your deity didn't tell you that. And you have certainly not seen me write anything of that sort of 'encouragement' anywhere. In other words, you are making things up and pretending they are facts.
Subjectivist indeed!
"why would rights exist or matter?"
Because human beings exist. And continuing to exist as a human being matters to human beings.
At this point, I will note that you couldn't even say "what, exactly, is a "right"". But you have certainly made clear that your *feelings* are indeed your *only* basis for accepting the idea of them.
Talk about worshiping your own whims!
"deity's whims". You did not address the TRUTH: there is no other objective basis for rights, other than "because I WANT to". My God, you are a moron. Get a life.
"there is no other objective basis for rights, other than "because I WANT to""
This is false. I have presented such a basis in *facts of reality* (as opposed to your *feelings*) in another post to this thread. But thanks for now *explicitly* admitting your subjectivism - ie your worship of whims, not facts.
Oh, and thanks for confessing the fact you can't even *define* the term "rights" - ie you can't even identify the thing your *feelings* claim exist.
> Because human beings exist. And continuing to exist as a human being matters to human beings.
And that demonstrates rights? How? Keep in mind not every human beings continued existence matters to every other human being. In fact, most human beings don't care about most other human beings.
"And that demonstrates rights? How?"
As I indicated, "I have presented such a basis in *facts of reality* (as opposed to your *feelings*) in another post to this thread." Specifically, in response to Keith's declaration about rights: "A human being's rights...pre-exist any culture and are above any human judgement" I stated: "Yes. Rights identify the actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others. And they exist because human beings are independent entities (aka individuals). It is the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind. It is the individual, not others, who makes them act. This fact pre-exists any culture and is not based on the whim of some Authority. Anyone who tries to pretend the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc is actually the foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind, etc of some other individual is blatantly contradicting "the fabric of reality" aka the facts about human beings.
THERE (which is but the tip of the iceberg) are the universally binding facts which you declare can not exist. No society, culture, or whim can change those facts. They can only be ignorant of or ignore them - like the culture you referenced which kills female babies at birth."
Now, I will note than NO one else here has even *defined* the term "right" here, let alone identified how that definition is valid or mine is invalid. And the problem with not defining the term "right" means they can neither rationally defend their claims about that unidentified concept, nor can they rationally disagree with my definition or the arguments for it, let alone the consequences of it.
So, I'll ask: do *you* have a definition for the term you keep using here - ie do you have a definition for the term "right"?
"Keep in mind not every human beings continued existence matters to every other human being."
That's irrelevant. The capacity to violate the individual's right to his own life and his own effort exists whether one believes rights are based on the facts of reality or the whims of a deity. As it doesn't change the supposed 'fact' of the dictates of your deity, neither does it change the facts of reality. All it means is that some individuals choose to violate those rights - the same way they can choose to act in contradiction to any facts of reality (or can choose to act in contradiction to the whims of your deity - ie can choose to 'sin').
In fact, that was the problem with Keith's article. Holly's complaint is that the people who were supposed to defend the individual's rights turned out to not hold rights as their standard at all. Holly discovered they - and most everyone else - held their own whims as their standard instead. Keith declared the only way to prevent this is for rights to be based on the whims of a deity instead. But, as he admits in his comments here, that isn't the truth. People can and do just as easily reject the whims of a deity as they do the whims of an individual or a group. In other words, Keith admits that his deity's rights beings 'transcendent' does nothing to prevent people from violating those rights. He explicitly declares that the ability of the individual to violate rights is an entirely separate issue - despite the fact that the wholesale violation of rights by people was Holly's entire complaint.
> Yes. Rights identify the actions a human being may take regardless of the consent of others. And they exist because human beings are independent entities (aka individuals). It is the individual's foot, hand, mouth, stomach, mind. It is the individual, not others, who makes them act.
And this implies rights, how? For example, if using my hands to kill someone else would make my life more convenient, why shouldn't I?
Oh yeah, for sure.
One day, it was, "Wear your mask, don't walk in crowds, stand six feet apart, you filthy disease carrier."
The next, "It's okay not to wear your mask while protesting; you're outdoors, and COVID doesn't work in crowds of pissed-off black people or Antifa terrorists.
“The Gods of the Copybook Headings” is a priceless expression of truth.
I have two objections to make: first that it is not true that all relationships are reduced to power relations in the absence of God and second that Christianity is the only way we can derive our rights. For the first one, I would appeal to evolutionary psychology: in essence, many of our moral intuitions are simply manifestations of psychological "modules" which are activated in response to environmental triggers including cultural narratives.
For the second, I think there have been some decently robust methods of defining and arguing about the nature of "rights" by the likes of Lysander Spooner, Herbert Spencer, and Murray Rothbard which are more internally consistent and consequently less expansive than those proffered today. For a more modern take that I personally find very compelling, there is Patrick Smith's anti-subjectivism. To be clear, I'm not saying that Christianity hasn't played a major role in substantiating the rights we enjoy today — just that it is not a necessary condition for those rights because robust secular approaches exist if you're willing to accept relatively uncontroversial axioms.
It is worth checking out this modest video for a discussion of liberalism and libertarianism that I think explains to a certain degree how we got to talking about rights like this and an alternative which is fair bit more steady than the statist philosophy we accept today.
I think the arguments you make for deriving rights without an ultimate moral authority is without the power needed to establish their authority. There may be truth to what you say, but all these arguments can be washed away when a larger, more ultimate argument (protect your neighbors, 2 weeks to flatten the curve) is weaponised by the government. Without an appeal to the ultimate value and right of each human soul to make these decisions, given by God, you will lose.
Damn it all, your meme's better than mine. I don't think you can re-grow Christianity. As I put in my sub-hed on my article on the very same problem, "you can't un-dig the fossils".
As you might infer, I came to a very different conclusion. The problem is not that we need to go back to being Christian despite the evidence against religion. (Pretending your way through the rituals as Holly tried to do strikes me as particularly obtuse!) It's that with the end of the perceived "truth" of religion, we threw out everything that came with it. Dawkins came up with the term "meme" to describe the "memetic evolution" of religious beliefs - survival of the fittest, basically. Of course, the religions that advocate missionary work and spreading the religion carry on where the religions that sacrifice their children on an altar once a year don't! But where Dawkins (and the rest of the early-2000s atheist movement) fell short was in not carrying on that logic. It was simply too focused on making people see religion itself as the problem in the wake of 9/11 that it failed to recognize the other side of the coin:
Wait a minute. These are the most memetically fit religions. They're the ones that do the best at forming a functioning society. Why are we tearing down everything those religions built just because they're not literally true? Why are we throwing out all the morality that the religion put into place in our society? He's come to that realization recently, but he's bemoaning the loss of buildings and hymns - he hasn't quite gotten to the deeper issue yet. That is, I suppose, for the next generation of thinkers.
If you are, like me, convinced that there is no god, but think the loss of religion has damaged society, I do not think the solution is to pretend your way through the religion. I do not think a 5D chess masterplan of "a bunch of smart people go pretend to be Christian to try to convince the masses to go to church again" is going to work, especially when the lefties have spent the past couple decades taking over churches and hanging up pride flags outside of them to signify their participation in the New Religion. "Default Christianity" is dead, and I am thoroughly unconvinced that there is a road to rebuilding it.
I instead advocate for extracting what you can FROM the bible, the history of Christianity, the western church. What worked, what didn't, why we should keep the stuff that worked - and the underpinnings of it all. After a bit of debate with Von (https://vonwriting.substack.com/) in my comments, I hit upon what I wanted to say all along: this is Chesterton's Fence.
(If you're interested in reading my full article - or just seeing my inferior meme - on this subject, see https://theflammifer.substack.com/p/towards-an-atheist-right .
If you think the atheists themselves are directly to blame for the problem, I did a breakdown of the results from the largest survey on non-religious people in America to demonstrate why they aren't: https://theflammifer.substack.com/p/examining-the-decline-of-christianity . The atheists went from 2% to 4%; the big movement has been the "nothing in particular" crowd. I contend that they are two distinct groups and point to a variety of data points from Pew that demonstrate this, both in terms of demographics and with respect to specific questions about beliefs.)
We need to make the transition to a world where rights are independent of the lie of “god”. As individual humans we can break free of this lie, but as a culture we still labor under the boot of the God freaks.
About Christian basis Magna Carta . . .
“FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. We have granted also, and given to all the Freemen of our Realm, for Us and our Heirs for ever, these Liberties under-written, to have and to hold to them and their Heirs, of Us and our Heirs for ever.
IX. THE City of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities, Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, as with all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties and free Customs.
XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.’’
Remember this document written by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Thanks
What she did not understand is that faith is a GIFT from God. You cannot be argued, cajoled, convinced into it. I would implore you to honestly and fervently seek Him. Read the word. Pray. Attend services. Really seek Him.
I actually understand that perfectly. My faith is a gift, not of my own doing. But to say so sounds arrogant, in a way. Why was I chosen? I have no idea. I only know I thank God every day that I am. But not knowing what God's will is for others, I choose to be obedient and SHOUT to the world that life is only found through a relationship with Jesus. The rest is up to God to sort.
"The reality that she and the rest of us face, of course, is that absent a transcendent basis for rights, the very idea of rights is illusory"
You've just declared that, like all other subjectivists, you believe the individual's right to his own life and his own effort are *not* based on the facts of reality (ie rights do *not* identify facts about human beings). Instead, again like all other subjectivists, you believe rights are just someone's arbitrary declarations (whims). And you are simply squabbling with the rest of the subjectivists over *whose* whims should be worshiped.
In this respect, you are right that the subjectivist "secularists" have simply taken over one of the fundamental "Christian ideas". You now both share the premise that Authority, *not* the facts of reality, is what validates ideas. Talk about *rejecting* reality for illusion!
"if God is not real, then rights can never be anything more than contingent privileges"
Except, of course, rights are not a magic bubble which protects the individual from violation. Rights are necessarily "contingent" upon everyone else respecting them and/or defending them from violation. This is true whether one believes rights are based on whim or fact. So, contrary to your claim here, the religious/secular distinction doesn't change the "contingency" of rights.
> You've just declared that, like all other subjectivists, you believe the individual's right to his own life and his own effort are *not* based on the facts of reality (ie rights do *not* identify facts about human beings).
Ok, I'll bite. What facts about reality are our rights based on?
> Instead, again like all other subjectivists, you believe rights are just someone's arbitrary declarations (whims).
God's actions aren't arbitrary, even if it is sometimes necessary to treat them that way since unlike Him, we are finite.
"God's actions aren't arbitrary"
By definition, your deity's every action is capricious - ie is dictated by nothing other than his desires, his whims. By definition, your deity's ideas and actions are not limited in any way - not by facts, not by reason, not by anything. Your deity's actions are the very definition of "arbitrary".
____
EDIT IN RESPONSE TO KEITH'S *FRAUD*-BASED PERSONAL ATTACK (BELOW) WHERE HE TRIED TO BLAME AND BAN ME FOR SINS *HE* ACTUALLY COMMITTED:
Keith: "[R4C's] game involves insisting upon framing the terms of a debate around his own idiosyncratic and peculiar definition of "right"."
Keith is the one playing games here, since neither HE nor anyone else bothered to provide a definition of rights. In fact, only AFTER Keith tried to ban me did he PRETEND to offer a definition of "right". And, of course, he STILL got it WRONG:
Keith: "Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality"
Keith's 'definition' here is a blatant EQUIVOCATION between the concept of 'human rights' (which is the topic of the article and the comments) and the concept 'what is right'. In other words, what Keith has provided as *his* definition of "right" is the ADJECTIVE definition of "right":
"1. Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality: do the right thing and confess. 2. In accordance with fact, reason, or truth; correct: the right answer."
Of course, the subject being discussed is the NOUN "right", NOT the ADJECTIVE "right". And, contrary to what Keith DESPERATELY wishes everyone would believe, they are NOT the same concept - anymore than the "bow" of a ship and a "bow" which shoots arrows are the same concept. Yet Keith now FRAUDULENTLY PRETENDS they *are* the same.
To repeat: they ain't.
So it turns out after ALL his personal attacks, Keith STILL has not defined the concept being discussed here - ie his EVERY use of the term is *literally* meaningless - ie Keith is *literally* saying NOTHING whatsoever here. His words are *literally* EMPTY.
In other words, Keith is *both* the one playing "rhetorical games" *and* the one NOT using a valid definition - certainly not "any normal shared definition" of a human "right". Put simply, Keith has engaged in nothing but the PROJECTION of *his* sins onto others here as his RATIONALIZATION for trying to ban me.
In fact, as he has amply demonstrated, Keith tried to ban me because he has NO rational argument to offer *for* his -undefined- ideas or *against* my ideas. He simply LIKES *his* ideas and doesn't LIKE mine. That fallacious Appeal to (his) Emotions is the *extent* and *entirety* of his 'argument' here.
Talk about WHIM worship!
Keith: "[R4C] insists on defining "right" as something tantamount to omnipotence in one or another specific sphere"
Keith is now an *outright* LlAR here. As anyone who actually *read* my discussion with Eugine can see, the references I made to "omnipotence" were in regard to the concept "ARBITRARY" (as in the arbitrary nature of their deity's supposed choices), NOT - as Keith FRAUDULENTLY declares - in regard to the concept or nature of "RIGHTS". Of course, Keith's *intentional* straw man - like his attempt to ban me - is just another way for him to DISHONESTLY *evade* (to RUN AWAY from) doing something he is INCAPABLE of doing: defining the *actual* terms being discussed, and then rationally supporting them.
Since Keith doesn't WISH me to post any further on his site, at this point all I can say is GOOD RIDDANCE to this evil creature who PRETENDS at following a godly morality while DELIBERATELY being DISHONEST and UNJUST. In this way, Keith is proof that - *regardless* of whether a morality is fact or god based - some people simply don't give a damn about morality (ie they will violate morality because they *feel* like doing so). THAT is what Holly complained about. And Keith has now *proven* here that believing an idea to be 'transcendent' does NOTHING to solve her problem.
Talk about making MY point *for* me!
> By definition, your deity's every action is capricious
They can seem that way to us since unlike Him, we and our minds are finite.
Eugine,
The commenter you're engaging has been warned before about the rhetorical games he or she (I'll assume "he") is playing. His game involves insisting upon framing the terms of a debate around his own idiosyncratic and peculiar definition of "right". In my view, his rhetorical games are not really designed to facilitate an honest discussion but to engage in some peculiar form of oneupmanship. More specifically, he insists on defining "right" as something tantamount to omnipotence in one or another specific sphere. His refusal to accept any normal shared definition of that term (e.g. "Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality.") or that there are even, in fact, multiple kinds of rights (e.g. inalienable, civil, objective, subjective, etc.) makes conversations with him nothing more than a through-the-looking-glass kind of experience.
I suspended him, as I told him I would. I'm sorry I had to interrupt your conversation but I had warned him previously.
His position is one that has unfortunately become popular during the last century, namely that freedom requires one to act insane since if one is constrained by sanity, one isn't really free.
We don't say that a wise ruler human is "powerless" since he rules according to wisdom and not whim. If anything, he's likely to be more powerful then one who rules arbitrarily.
"Arbitrary" implies something that has the potential to be otherwise. God has all his potential realized.
Would you say mathematics, e.g., one plus one being two, is arbitrary?
"Arbitrary implies something that has the potential to be otherwise. God has all his potential realized."
Arbitrary means not limited by something. And it refers to choice, specifically to things which can make choices (which is why asking is "one plus one being two...arbitrary" is nonsensical - the same way asking 'is a boulder's choice to roll downhill arbitrary' is nonsensical; one and one didn't *choose* to be two anymore than the boulder *chose* to roll downhill). Arbitrary identifies a particular type of reason *for* a choice. Specifically, arbitrary means one's choice is not limited by anything but the choosers own desires (whims, feelings, wishes, etc). And arbitrary stands in contrast to any and all other types of reasons for a choice.
And, boy oh boy, in hatred of the idea that your 'god' is NOT limited - ie is NOT arbitrary - did you go ahead and *completely* limit your 'god'. You just declared that the thing you worship is capable of NO self-motivated action whatsoever. By your above accounting, your deity has no Will of its own, but is instead completely determinate - ie your object of worship is no different than billiard balls. You've just declared your 'god' can not *choose* to act any differently than it does - any more than two plus two can *choose* to equal five. In other words, you just declared your supposedly "omnipotent" (aka unlimited) deity has NO free will whatsoever, because free will *requires* the ability to choose among multiple alternatives - something you just declared the thing you worship can NOT do.
Put simply, you've not only removed your deity's omnipotence, you've denied him *any* potency whatsoever. You have rendered your 'god' completely *impotent* - denying it *any* Free Will. In doing so, you've thus reduced the thing you worship to nothing more than Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover". Way to go!
PS: since you bring up "mathematics"I will point out that both rights and mathematics are derived from the facts of reality - ie both are NOT decrees made by a deity *apart* from and unconnected *to* the facts of reality. Both ideas are based on the facts of reality (ideas which are true whether or not one believes reality was created by a deity or not) - ie *both* ideas are "part of the fabric of reality" (as Keith put it) and, as such, do not require a divine tablet, carved by 'god' and handed down from 'on high', to make either idea true. They are both facts about reality, discoverable and applicable by man and his rational mind - no divine intervention necessary.
Thanks for a very observant post on a very topical subject.
Enjoyed the column :-)
You and Holly and Russel and Ayan have each got your hand on something I've been pondering for a long time as well.
The problem with a "Christian basis for western morality" is that it's never been the case. Christianity has played a vital role in creating the conditions for western ethics of liberty, but it is not the source. It is, rather, the flux that allows the ethics--which originate in pre-Roman Germania and Gaul in our cultural history (they popped up in other places as well, but those places didn't contribute to the Western Tradition till much much later). Christian morality, per se, is more-or-less at odds with liberty, but its scripture have just enough wiggle room to allow it to serve as an excellent cultural binder and play second fiddle to pagan morality (which shouldn't be surprising as it originated as an underclass religion in a pagan empire).
The problem we're having now isn't that "secular morality is inadequate" (I consider the concept of "secular morality" a nonsensical one) but that secularism is not an adequate cultural binder once you step outside of growing metropolitan trading centers.
Unfortunately, Christianity has been dying as a cultural force for 500 years, and it isn't coming back, unless-and-except it reinvents itself at least as radically as it did when it became the Roman state religion or during the Reformation. Currently, there's nothing in Christianity with the potential to go viral enough to re-conquer the world. That could change, but it will take an extraordinary set of characters and some radical theological re-imaginings to pull it off.
Nonetheless, *something* must emerge to serve as that flux-and-binder before a culture of anything like the scale of the United States can be again maintained effectively. I tend to think that we're due for large-scale political systems to revert to decentralization for a civilizational season, but only time will really tell.
Anyway, I go into these ideas in more depth here:
https://jdanielsawyer.substack.com/p/neo-trads-and-the-end-of-the-world