I get hung up on atheism as it relates to this phrase in the Declaration:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
If you don’t believe in God, then you don’t believe that God is the granter of our rights and therefore, you must believe that men grant them. And if men grant them, what’s to prevent them taking them away at some point.
God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. He will never change and he will never take back the Rights he gives us.
Sure, atheists can have many views which are in line with conservatism, but in my opinion, one of the cornerstones of conservatism is that God is the granter of the unalienable Rights referred to in the Declaration. The Founding Fathers included that phrase because they wanted to make it clear that God is the author of our Rights and they are not subject to the whims and fancies of man.
That being said, if she votes the right way, no problem. Keep praying.
Good Post. An atheist denies their God given rights. They only subscribe to the government with which they live. No repercussion, no judgment, no reason for being.
Non-sequitor.
What about those of us who believe we can define what our rights ought to be, within the context of our own moral judgments...and are willing to kill those who try to take them away if their transgressions are sufficiently egregious?
NOBODY grants me my rights except me.
As to your comment re: to an atheist, God didn’t give rights, hence men gave rights and therefore can take them away... you left out another alternative, the one I subscribe to (as an atheist).
I believe that my rights are claimed by myself, and for myself. No one can take them away from me without a fight.
Hope this helps. :thumbsup:
:)
Conservative atheist “all the way”
“If you don’t believe in God, then you don’t believe that God is the granter of our rights and therefore, you must believe that men grant them.”
That’s a stretch... No, worse than that, it’s short sighted.
"A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self- sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action-which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)
...
The Declaration of Independence stated that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind—a rational being—that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival." Ayn Rand - Man's Rights
An atheist, and she did not argue that rights come from man. She states that they are a fact of nature.
"But where does nature come from?" "But where does God come from?" - Here we go. ;-)
Speaking of nature, the following is a good essay and should explain why it is wrong to call Rand an libertarian... The Nature of Government
If you all agree that the initiation of physical force is wrong, then you all have something in common.
No. Fallacy of the false dichotomy. There is literally a whole universe out there that does not have to be explained by either "God did it" or "man did it."
Fundamental rights are simply a necessary condition of being human. How rights, or any other philosophical construct, can exist a priori without resorting to a God who created them is a fairly complicated area of philosophy I won't delve into; suffice it to say that the simplest explanation, "God did it," is not the only coherent and logically consistent one. Mathematics flows from a few basic postulates, without regard to whether those came from an omnipotent creator or not.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident" -- not revealed by scripture. "their Creator" and, elsewhere in the Declaration, "the laws of nature and of nature's God." These are references to natural law, not to a particular religious tradition or a particular conception of the Divine.
God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. He will never change and he will never take back the Rights he gives us.
"to preserve these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. ...[W]henever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
This construction holds true whether the laws of nature exist as a synthetic a priori or as the gift of a benevolent God. If they are laws of an impersonal Nature, there is no universal assent to what those rights are, and the task falls to the people to determine what they are and how best to preserve them. If they are ordained by God, there is no universal assent, and the end result is the same.