M.D. Rawlings
Classical Liberal
While I believe in God, I have struggled with the idea that Thomas Jefferson put forth:
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.
Unalienable means (from the net): incapable of being repudiated or transferred to another.
Now, if China chooses to be communist....and forbids your rights, what difference does it make if they can't "repudiate" them (refuse to accept that they exist) ? You still don't get to exercise them....and, in effect, they have been removed.
While recently reading Ezra Taft Benson's talk on the proper role of goverment, he states that the most important function of government is to secure the rights and freedoms of individuals.
Can someone explain to me how we don't have secure rights without government ?
I just don't see it.
Without government informing us what our rights might be, or not be, the only law in effect is the law of the jungle. We're animals, and if you have something I want, I might opt to simply take it, and if you resist me you do so at your peril (purely a hypothetical.) Can't imagine many like government of any stripe telling you what you can or can't do, but they do protect us well from the alternative.
As mere animals, we don't have any 'inalienable rights.' Since without a government to write them down they simply don't exist in nature. Big fish eat little fish is what it boils down to. But no fish are backing away from an easy meal out of some observance of the little fish's right to exist and be happy (and not be eaten.) Even WITH religion that right doesn't exist.
You couldn't be more wrong. Government doesn't inform us about what our rights are. We know what our rights are by way of the self-evident realities of human interaction in the state of nature. It's not the other way around at all. We come from the state of nature--ontologically, epistemologically and historically!
Not convinced?
Let's get to the tangible nuts and bolts of the matter. . . .
Should I raise my hand against your life, your liberty or your property, you bloody well know that you have but four alternatives: fight, flee, submit or die.
Choose.
And you bloody well know that should I prevail, though spare your life as my slave, we are still locked into a state of war, as it were, relative to the imperatives of natural law and the inalienable rights thereof; for as long as I fail to love God and obey His law and, consequently, fail to love you as my equal, we remain locked into a state of fear and oppression, alternately, one ever subject to the threat of revolt and the reversal of fortunes. Except in the face of overwhelming initial force, what human being has ever surrendered any aspect of his liberty or his property in the absence of some form of due process or compensation?
Speaking of which. . . .
Humans are either born/forced into a state of civil government or they willingly unite themselves to form a civil government in order to establish a semblance of mutual security. The degree to which they retain the right of self-governance within the parameters of the respective social contract varies.
But make no mistake about it, you know very well that it's wrong to arbitrarily violate the life, the liberty or the property of another, as you would not like it one damn bit if another were to do the same to you.
Do unto thy neighbor as you would have thy neighbor do unto you.
Hence, the only legitimate, sustainable and coherently just form of government is a constitutional Republic of limited power relative to the imperatives of natural law.
Natural Law of the Anglo-American Tradition, Relative to the Inescapable Realities of Human Interaction as Ontologically Justified by the Sociopolitical Ramifications of Judeo-Christianity's Ethical System of Thought 101.
_____________________________________
What is this risible nonsense of so many of you who fail to see or pretend not to see the tangible, every-day-walk-in-the-park dynamics of inalienable rights? At the very least they are obviously endowed in terms of the inherent exigencies of human interaction and those of self-preservation.
Dudes! Get real. There's nothing theoretical about natural law or natural rights. They're self-evident. Let me point my Smith and Wesson 9mm at your head: you'll either be standing in a puddle of urine or drop a load in your pants . . . or fight back if you can manage it without getting shot first.
Got tangible substance now?
Can you smell it?
And the conservatives among you are being especially silly, talking like leftist space cadets as if these realities were the mere protestations of human culture or the specters of human imagination. Really? Since when?
And for those of you who can track the implication of the following to its unmistakable conclusion at the most intellectually intimate level of apprehension, in the light of the rational forms and logical categories of human consciousness and moral decision, concerning the imperatives of natural law: since when did the relativist acquire the power to explain how two diametrically opposed ideas could possibly both be true at the same time, in the same way, within the same frame of reference?
Anyone can say that truth is relative. But no one who says that can heal the inherently contradictory and self-negating assertion that there are no absolute truths, except the absolute truth that there are no absolute truths.
That is to say, the assertion that there are no absolute truths is necessarily false.
God is not mocked; He just laughs at the foolishness of the "wise."