[r9etb]

So why post an entire screed the tries to point out how much everyone owns everyone else and how all morality flows directly from your particular brand of priesthood?

The Founders were not stupid -- they understood quite well what they were doing when they attributed our "unalienable rights" to the action of a Creator.

Here's your assignment: try to logically derive the idea of "unalienable" principles without reference to a Creator.

You can't do it without resorting to self-defeating utilitarian (or otherwise relativist) arguments that render moot the whole idea of "unalienable rights."

The next step is to ask whether the logically necessary Creator is equivalent to a Christian God (which is what I think TG's point boils down to). On that score, we can only observe that the "unalienable rights" have historically been enumerated by Christian culture, and few if any others.

Certainly the tenets of Christianity are fully consistent with the unalienable rights we take for granted in the US, even if we do not consistently follow those tenets.

[Dead Corpse]

Hogwash. Self awareness and self ownership are perfect basis points for indivudal Rights. Ones that in fact preclude any "group" Rights or forced sacrifice of the individual to the masses.

Even by your own tennets, it is your God that gave you free will. For another mere human to take that free will away from you is a violation of Gods will.

Christian culture? Like the Christian Kings of England and their treatment of the peasant class? Or the Emporers of Rome after conversion to Christianity and the abuses done in their names?

History, it seems, is against you on that one.