Gary Childress wrote: ↑Mon Apr 19, 2021 3:22 pm
Thank you for a very detailed and thoughtful answer.
You're most welcome, Gary. Thanks for your patience while I explained myself.
So if rights are God-given, then how do we come to know what is a God-given right and what is not?
John Locke gave us the answer to that. If I can be permitted to summarize, what he said was basically this:
1. God gave everybody a right to life. This is evident, because we were created by God, and here we are. God doesn't do things for no reason. So nobody can ever say to another person, "You have no right to be alive." God says, "Yes, he does."
So far, so good?
2. But, Locke says, God also calls mankind to account for what he does. We know this because of passages like Revelation 20:12. "And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds."
If we are judged for our "deeds," we must be allowed to do some "deed," to make some choices for ourselves, so as to either to the right things or to refuse to do them. We have to have our own volition, and a range of action that includes both the good and the not-good. If we have no choice about what we do, then how could God judge us? For we would merely be robots, doing what we were programmed to do, not responsible, personal agents making choices for ourselves.
So the second unalienable right all human beings have is freedom, "liberty," as Locke puts it, power of choice.
3. But liberty is meaningless if we have
nothing with which to act. Freedom entails that we have some things, of some kind, under our stewardship, so as to show faithfulness in the dispensing of them. This was originally intended to be a blessing to the earth; that mankind would be able to arrange, sort, distribute and move things so as to make the world a better place. Now that mankind is apart from God, it has become a bad thing sometimes, because man uses it to damage, hoard, immiserate, steal, and so on. But it was not intended to be like that, and won't always be.
So mankind's third unalienable right is "property." He has to have something with which to work, something upon which, and with which, to work the good for which he will be rewarded and the bad for which he will be judged. Freedom means you have to have not just range of motion, but also something with which to show stewardship.
Thus, the third right is necessitated in the second, and both by the Judgment (which Locke calls 'The Great Day.")
Locke says more, too. He has a fair discussion about the importance of human conscience, and the responsibility we all have to allow others to act on theirs. But the three above rights have been the main ones, and have ended up in every human rights code, in one form or another, since Locke....even though people have completely forgotten Locke's original rationale.
How do we communicate with God to ask him/her/it what is a right and what isn't?
Well, I hope the above clarifies what Locke did to get that answer. And, of course, there are other rights, too...not per se "human rights," which pertain to all "humans" equally, but various personal "rights" as well. For example, the Bible makes it very clear from Genesis that marriage gives partners exclusive rights to each others affections, and that this right is also backed by God. But since not everybody is married, we don't call that a "human right," but rather a "marriage right," perhaps.
I think our chief concern here is not with every right any human being anywhere can have -- which are considerable, given what the Bible says -- but the "basic human rights," as mentioned above. "Basic" because prior to all others, "human" because grounded in the fact of our common humanity," and "rights" because universal. Is that not fair?
Also, can rights evolve?
"Evolve"? Hmmm...since they cannot be derived from evolution, that would necessarily make that a strange thought. But stranger still would be the idea that Gary today would have a "universal human right" he might lose tomorrow, or might gain a different "human right" the day after.
Again, if we are talking about "basic human rights," that has to be universal and permanent -- given by reason of what one IS, not merely by contingent features of circumstance, no?
...there has been a change of attitude toward slavery over the course of history.
Well, human attitudes do change. At one time, not only blacks but women were not considered "human beings." But "human rights" are in no way anything conferred by mere attitudes. You and I think that was still always wrong, don't we? We think that women had a
right (i.e. a legitimate entitlement) to equal treatment as human beings, even when they were not being given the
chance to have equal treatment as human beings, don't we?
If we say that rights are God-given and that all else is a privilege then have we gained anything substantial?
Absolutely. We've gained the unalienable moral right to claim ownership of our own lives, our own choices, and our own property. That's far from nothing: it's the fundamental realization that not only founded the States but ultimately also doomed Southern chattel slavery and the unequal legal regarding of women.
Have we gained the ability to know the mind of God in order to know what is a God-given right and what isn't?
Not necessarily. But if we want to understand what makes those rights legitimate, we're going to have to believe in God. No God, no rights.
It seems to me that we are in an impossible situation where endless errors and even excesses can be made regardless of having given them a divine foundation.
Not at all hopeless, Gary. After all, slavery did end in the US, and women did get equal rights. That's pretty great, actually. But I wonder to what we would refer to sustain those rights today, since many of us no longer believe in God. Already we see the right of children to life is being destroyed. And we also see that skin colour is returning as a basis of who is regarded as properly human, and who is deserving of hatred and scorn. That does not bode well for the future, it's true.
But in a sense, we can expect it. Man has rejected God. What alternate rationale can we possibly find to explain why anybody has "rights"?
And you can see that RC and others have realized this problem, and as testament to their intellectual courage, (if not to the advantage of rights) have decided to embrace it rather than deny it. They're maybe not right about God, but they are being intellectually honest, are they not?
That's why they claim there is no such thing as a "right." It's not because they're mean people, I think, as I find people like RC quite decent folk, actually; so I suggest it's because they are thinking through the logic of their own assumptions about God, and then making a very warranted conclusion. However, I happen to think they're wrong about God, so they're wrong about rights as well.