Comment by dns_snek
10 hours ago
> No. It's not. Governments are not natural. So you have no "fundamental" rights here.
You could make the same moot point about all societal laws. Fundamental rights are determined by the constitution, the UN declaration of human rights, as well as any other local charters.
Rights are granted by God, the Constitution merely acknowledges them. If you don’t believe in God, or think human hierarchies determine rights, then they aren’t really rights anymore. They are privileges.
Barring physical limitations, what you can and can't do is ultimately determined by what the society you are by and large a part of deems to be acceptable behaviour.
Government rules and social norms can change over time, it ultimately doesn't matter what you feel is "right" or what some law says is "right", it's really about what you can get away with.
A large part of what you can get away with is determined about whether or not you will ultimately be penalized for your actions (possibly through violence), and laws can keep people aligned on what is or isn't going to be accepted and when people deemed to be acting in a socially unacceptable way are likely to be penalized in some form.
While "rights" may be somewhat philosophical, they can have very real physical "weight" behind them in the form of other people "enforcing" them.
And finally, in case you are mistakenly under the impression that I think it's okay for anyone to do anything they want so long as they can get away with it, I don't, but that discussion drifts into the territory of morality and ethics which, while related, are nevertheless different and very large topics of discussion in themselves.
Which god grants these rights? Krishna? Elohim? Muhammad? Jesus? Buddha? Allah? Ahura? Yahweh? The flying spaghetti monster?
Please provide real proof to such a claim.
And if it is indeed God who grants rights, why are such rights not universal to all of God's creations, and instead, only granted to white rural Americans when it is convenient to them?
The comment was not an appeal to religion. It's making the point that the notion of intrinsic rights is philosophical, and there must be a greater authority above all human systems if there can be a right at all. Otherwise, it's just something that the prevailing authority allows.
The point as it relates to the American Constitution is that that it was conceived with the notion of these divine rights and explicitly recognizes that there is no authority that can deprive the individual of them, thereby placing a hard limit on what a government can do.
You're free to disagree with the notion, of course, but it's worth understanding the foundation.
…or, Baal, Nature, Reason, etc. take your pick, heck probably even AI; which would “happily” explain it to you and answer all your “clever” questions, unlike me.
2 replies →
If you believe rights are what God and the Constitution grant, then they're meaningless. Some piece of paper has no real–world relevance. Cops shooting people in the face has real–world relevance.
If you think that I believe the Constitution “grant” rights, then your comment is meaningless (and you lack basic comprehension).
God doesn't have a typewriter, as far as I know. When he gets one I hope he clears up which 99.9% of human religions are heretical and which 0.01% are divine law, that would be really helpful.
In the meantime, rights are not granted by anyone. They are a contract between the governed and those that govern. Breaking that contract is the sort of thing that doesn't end up working out well for the governing class.
Since the existence of God is implicit in your assertion, are you suggesting he isn’t omnipotent, or have you come up with a new definitional concept of ownership? Or maybe you just don’t believe in the existence of typewriters.