I suggest we make inquiries of Materialists such as Dawkins or Pinker to the effect: Are all men (ie Mankind) created equal? Are they, then, endowed with inalienable rights? Do governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed? If the response to these questions is ‘yes,’ then let us further inquire if that ‘yes’ is categorical or conditional. We must suspect that the response would be heavily conditional. So conditional, in fact, that it would be in effect not a ‘yes’ at all, but a resounding ‘NO!’
That being the case, then it was Calvin Coolidge who phrased best what the response ought to be:
“No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions [the inquiries I listed above]. If anyone wishes to deny their truth and soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress.” (Philadelphia, speech commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 5, 1926)
Yes.. Unalienable by whom?...
If Certain RIGHTS were given by God and those rights are none of governments business.. THEN, government cannot adjust them.. Since "the Government" didn't grant them..
Grant them meaning... "grant privledges"..
Which is what ALL democracys have.. "privledges" granted by the government..
In a real sense no democracy on earth has any "rights" merely privledges granted by the government which can be adjusted, on a whim.. Thats why democracy is indeed Mob Rule..
UNalienable is a word in our Constitution echoed NOWHERE in any other Constitution on this planet, I know of.. For good reason too.. UNalienable rights can only be vouched safe by God(the real one).. Deport God and the word UNalienable becomes mere rhetoric.. Could be thats the ACLU's real agenda... deporting God.. or at least giving God a green card..
You know, so that "we"(in the U.S.) can become a democracy like in Canada and Europe..
Where God(the real one) is pretty much UNwelcome...
Absolutely. The rise of freedom in the west owed something to liberal philosophy, but its solid foundations were laid by Christianity over the course of the middle ages.
Christianity taught that all are equal, whether Greek or Jew, man or woman, slave or free, from the time of the Apostles. And it taught the lesson already present in Judaism, that God gives men freedom of choice--something Muslims don't have a clue about. The choice given most explicitly in Deuteronomy, but seen throughout the Bible: that men are free to choose good or evil, to follow or to defy the Covenant.
This does not mean that everyone has to be a Christian to be free, but it does mean that if they start to undermine the foundations on which freedom was based, then they start leading the country into a new kind of slavery.
Peter Singer illustrates this, when he argues that a one-year-old child can be killed for convenience, and is perhaps worth less than a dog. And the Darwinists were behind the eugenics movements, the development of "scientific" notions of race in the nineteenth century, and the idea that those who fall behind in the evolutionary climb deserve no pity.
There has been quite a lot of work done, from the time of Toqueville, illustrating that freedom in America works, however imperfectly, because a majority of citizens freely choose to discipline themselves, because of their own moral sense, usually religious. The Great Awakening of the nineteenth century, for instance, played a part in preserving American freedom. Because citizens act relatively virtuously, guided by inner constraints, it is less neccessary to impose discipline from above by the police.
Again, one need not be a Jew or a Christian to follow the basic moral codes or virtues, but without religion these habits quickly degenerate into Hobbes's state of natural anarchy.