There was a pretty famous Englishman named john Locke who wrote abut "Life, Liberty, and Property" To American this should sound fairly familiar. Jefferson one of the founders wrote about Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. No matter what modern christian revisionist would like you to think, the ideas surging during the founding of the United States are the ideas of humans like Locke, not any list of instructions bellowed by flaming shrubberies. So if we are to loose the fiction of rights as gifts from the gods, how do we justify such things?
Interestingly if you are an American it is all right there in the constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain the establish this Constitution for the United States of America
Rights are forged from WE THE PEOPLE! They are not a list of things that we are free to do, but rather, and more importantly, a list of prohibitions on the government. They tell the government that it SHALL NOT pass laws regarding a persons ability to do such and such. Rights are rules against government.
A person without society or government are naturally free. She can do whatever she feels like doing at the time. However, at the same time, she are limited to those goals that she can bring about all by herself. Can she have a car? Sure, if you can mine the ore, make metal and plastic and glass, and form all these raw materials into the finished object of her desire, all by herself. Oh, and then protect it so that someone else coming along doesn't just up and leave with it. Th
is is what Thomas Hobbes was thinking when he described life for people in this state: No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This sounds like it kinda sucks to me.
To overcome this we work together for the common good. But we needed a set of guidelines and institutions to make sure everyone played fair. So we created Ethics, and Governments. The better the two of these are the more liberty and happiness for the most people in the society. But, we didn't want the institutions we created for helping us get along make rules that had such rules been in place from the beginning we would never have agreed to come together. That is a very convoluted way of saying we didn't want rules that we just couldn't live with. Rules that limited us for simply being who we are; or even limitations on our most fundamental beliefs. To protect ourselves from this tyranny we TOOK some freedoms for ourselves, and would not let government come near them. We call these freedoms rights.
All people have taken the same rights for themselves. They are not special rights or privileges when these same rights are taken by unpopular groups. Our rights are not subject to interpretation through the lens of Flaming Shrubberies, Mt, Olympus, Ancestral Spirits or any other bullshit out there. These are our rights. These are My rights, and I'm taking them back!
Alex
Rights are forged from WE THE PEOPLE! They are not a list of things that we are free to do, but rather, and more importantly, a list of prohibitions on the government. They tell the government that it SHALL NOT pass laws regarding a persons ability to do such and such. Rights are rules against government.
A person without society or government are naturally free. She can do whatever she feels like doing at the time. However, at the same time, she are limited to those goals that she can bring about all by herself. Can she have a car? Sure, if you can mine the ore, make metal and plastic and glass, and form all these raw materials into the finished object of her desire, all by herself. Oh, and then protect it so that someone else coming along doesn't just up and leave with it. Th
is is what Thomas Hobbes was thinking when he described life for people in this state: No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This sounds like it kinda sucks to me.To overcome this we work together for the common good. But we needed a set of guidelines and institutions to make sure everyone played fair. So we created Ethics, and Governments. The better the two of these are the more liberty and happiness for the most people in the society. But, we didn't want the institutions we created for helping us get along make rules that had such rules been in place from the beginning we would never have agreed to come together. That is a very convoluted way of saying we didn't want rules that we just couldn't live with. Rules that limited us for simply being who we are; or even limitations on our most fundamental beliefs. To protect ourselves from this tyranny we TOOK some freedoms for ourselves, and would not let government come near them. We call these freedoms rights.
All people have taken the same rights for themselves. They are not special rights or privileges when these same rights are taken by unpopular groups. Our rights are not subject to interpretation through the lens of Flaming Shrubberies, Mt, Olympus, Ancestral Spirits or any other bullshit out there. These are our rights. These are My rights, and I'm taking them back!
Alex
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1 comment:
I like how you put "Rights are rules against government." Most people forget that if they ever even think about it.
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