When Two Rights make a Wrong: The arbitrary creation of rights and how it is destroying our most basic protections of law. Click the link to hear the show
Human Rights are a Christian idea. Others might use, borrow, steal, reinterpret, or deny them but they are only possible within a worldview sufficient to give them proper grounding. Without this, they are just words that correspond to no existing object.
The Enlightenment fell in love with rights talk, especially natural rights talk, because there seemed to be a way to draw legal boundaries from mere consensus. When a society has a sufficient moral/rational foundation to compel self restraint, even when the outward form is in the runny language of the Enlightenment, individual rights and the common good can coexist, and even thrive. Christianity has provided that basic ethical form for thousands of years in the West, and more specifically, in the American experience. In this, every inch of our progress or social advancement has been a Christian inch.
With that Christian ethical environment rapidly evaporating over the last few decades and nothing to replace it, it has become increasingly plain that Enlightenment rationalism and/or empiricism, plus nothing, equals an unintelligible mess of contradictory ideas, none of which hold any persuasive force in regard to the measurement of social norms. But the language of rights continues unabated regardless of the “rights” so called lacking any identifiable justification or clear meaning. In contemporary use, “rights” have become a simple synonym for whatever I or my group of confederates want and are willing to manipulate the political system to ensure. Rights have been reduced to a combination of political power and the force of the state, and this combination is neither something new to political history nor unpredictable in its inevitable effects.
There is incredible danger in the change here described. When everything becomes a right, nothing remains a right. The existence and recognition of human rights, much less civil rights is an extraordinarily delicate thing. Rights, unless very carefully measured can easily become the mere effect of an arbitrary state; the rule of men replacing the rule of law. The unshackled will replacing moral reasoning and time tested precedent. The reason that the wholesale creation of “rights” detached from any metaphysical or ethical worldview sufficient to give them meaning is so disturbing is because there are very real dangers and powers in the world with magnificent animosity to the most basic ideas of human rights and these thinly disguised promotions of self interest cast doubt on even the most obvious moral duties. Thus when genocide and slavery are still the rule rather than the exception in much of our small world and children are trafficked for sex and labor, the claims of human rights to polygamy, or pornography, or therapeutic abortions begin to look and empty as they really are.
Before and right or a duty can be reasonably maintained one must establish the kind of a thing that we are and the conditions in which we exist. The Christian Worldview expresses inherent human value as one of its most basic presuppositions due to the creation in the image of God of every human being. Most of the recent claims to rights to this and that being rooted in naturalistic and materialistic worldviews, the claim to have an actual right of whatever kind, seems to be in direct conflict with very nature of the rights themselves.
If rights are given by God, and God made people to be a certain kind of thing, and made them to do certain kinds of things and to not do other kinds of things, one cannot then argue for a right to do the kind of thing that God did not make people to do. If rights are God given, then they are limited in their scope to the rights God gives; if rights are not God given then we have no duty to regard them. Either way, we have no duty act as if people have a right to anything immoral or unchaste or to pretend that people have a God given right to do that which is unnatural in regard to the kind of thing that God made them to be.
Thus rights to life, liberty, peace, property, worship, the maintenance of an ordered community, to raise one’s children according to one’s faith, and to protect oneself and one’s family from harm are rights and not much else is.
Neiswonger
Click link below to hear the show.
When Two Rights make a Wrong: The arbitrary creation of rights and how it is destroying our most basic protections of law.
Neiswonger
Doug
Josh Hicks
Clay
