Who gave you your rights?

[Tobin S.]

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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."

Those are the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence. Forgive me if I sound like a simpleton here. I don't have a college education, but I'm going to do my best to be all intellectual and stuff. :)

I was talking to a Libertarian tonight who said that rights are god-given and cannot be taken away by humans. He went on to say that any right given to you by man can be taken away. He used the above lines from the Declaration to try to make his point.

So, seeing as how I'm an atheist, he kind of pissed me off. I told him that mom and dad created me and the founding fathers gave me my rights. The Declaration of Independence is a pretty cool document, but it isn't the law of the land and that's the way that guy was trying to make it sound. The Declaration was just their fancy way of telling Britain to fuck off.

The law of the land is the Constitution, and God isn't in there. In the Constitution we have the Bill of Rights- still no God. The people who wrote the Constitution just thought we should be civil toward each other while living as freely as possible, and they tried to set things up that way. There's nothing supernatural going on there.

I hadn't looked at the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence since high school, about twenty years ago. Let me know if I missed something.

[rrneck]

1. It sure as hell wasn't god.

We gave us our rights. We looked at ourselves and our place in the world. We decided how humans ought to live and worked out, piece at a time, a system of reciprocity fitting for our species.

It's a work in progress.

[vixengrl]

2. Exactly--I think humans are in a constant dialog

about what we can and can't do, but we negotiate our freedoms and our laws. Nothing was handed to us--we made law by trial & error. Slowly, we figured out what transgression were tolerable misdemeanors, and what were unforgiveable breaches. Also these change--it's complicated.

[darkstar3]

3. The truth pisses a lot people off, but that doesn't change it: Society gave us all our rights.

Think about it. You can start with the example of voting.

Today we all have the right to vote, so long as we have achieved voting age. That is not how our laws were written. Our laws were written by white, slave-owning, land-holding members of high society who had the audacity and the sheer presence of balls to write down that slaves weren't citizens, and only people belonging to their own class could vote.

Now think about it further: Compare what rights you would have under a pure anarchy to those you have under any system of government.

Our rights do not come from some creator or some ambiguous "natural law", but by contracts that we enter into with each other when we either choose or are forced to live together. These contracts are necessary to provide for our continued survival and prosperity

[ZombieHorde]

4. Rights are a concept clever people invented to keep the strong from attacking the weak. nt

[onager]

5. Good editing.

"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."

When Thomas Jefferson (of all people) drafted the Declaration, that line originally said: "We hold these truths to be sacred..."

Ben Franklin grumbled that Jefferson's line "smacked too much of the pulpit." As a scientist, inventor and skeptic, Franklin replaced "sacred" with a word taken directly from the world of scientific observation and experiment - "self-evident."

I wish they had dumped "Creator" as well. But that's such a nice fuzzy word, it can mean just about anything - including nature and the laws of evolution as well as Big-Bearded-Guy-On-A-Cloud hurling thunderbolts at Ben Franklin's kite.

[immoderate]

6. But everybody has a creator. For me it was my parents.

Notice the Declaration specifies "their" creator not "the" creator. Whoever (or whatever) created you endowed you with these rights.

I also acknowledge, as stated above, that rights are allowed by social contract.

--imm

[frogmarch]

7. My Puritan ancestor said

the king of England did, or at least had promised it.

Here's a page from Essex county, Massachusetts, court records from the year 1664. From reading the bottom half of the page, I gathered that my 7th great-grandfather Simon/Symon Tuttle believed that the king of England promised liberty to the colonists. Symon seems to have been ready for the Revolutionary War 110 years before it happened.

Symon was sent to prison and smacked with a stiff fine. He was offered a reduction in his sentence for good behavior, but since he wouldn't stop rabble-rousing while in prison, the offer was revoked.

[FiveGoodMen]

8. "You were born free, you got fucked out of half of it and you wave a flag celebrating it."

-- Doug Stanhope

Society doesn't give us rights, it gives us restrictions.

The concept of rights is an attempt to limit that process.

[Deep13]

9. No god or ecclesiastical branch of govt. in the Constitution...

...and a VERY limited mention of supernatural in the DOI. No mention of Christianity.

[dmallind]

10. Proximally, government. Initially, human society

If anyone thinks a god gave us our rights let them invoke those rights under other governments or power structures. I suggest starting with North Korea and then Somalia to get a good spectrum. Government through it's legal and law enforcement arms gives us rights, but they do so because human society, beginning all the way back with "kill Thag and he cannot help us hunt mammoth any more", has developed the strcuture whereby mutual success is greater when all have some measure of saefty and protection, and even freedom to more or less an exent.

People can wax poetical about teh "right" to free speech or bearing arms being above the level of government negation, but that's wishful thinking. At least one of those bromides is true. Rights granted by humans (all of them) can be taken away by humans (all of them). Anybody who thinks all your rights cannot be taken away by humans is bilissfully unaware of many things.

[Odin2005]

11. Rights are created by society and only exist in the context of said society.

The notion of "inherent rights" is, to quote Jeremy Bentham, nonsense on stilts. It is a remnant of how many pre-modern societies and all traditional "primitive" societies lacked a conceptual distinction between social norms and natural laws, in such societies social norms are treated as laws of nature, laid down by the Gods.