The Origin Of Rights
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 5 months ago
Via WiscoDave, this trivial missive on the origin of rights by Alan Korwin at America Handgunner.
Was Thomas Jefferson wrong? Not about everything, just this: “Rights are unalienable.” If rights are unalienable, the Chinese people, all one-and-a-half billion of them, would be armed. Women living in oppressed countries would be free. In fact, all peoples would be free, and armed, and tyrants would be under the gun — not the other way around. Sorry, Tom, rights are not unalienable.
Rights are easily lost. That’s the truth. With apologies in advance to my wild-eyed, dyed-in-the-wool libertarian friends and their utopian ideals, your rights and your property are neither unalienable nor derived from the natural order of the universe. Your right to your life, your guns, and everything else you think you own is based on pure and raw power.
You own what you own because you can exercise dominion over it, you can demand it. The moment you lose or relinquish that power, or someone with greater power takes it from you, your home or your pencil is no longer yours. This is the ugly truth of life on planet Earth. Jefferson was wrong. What he said is nice, it has served us well in its own way, it’s just not the case.
This sounds like the Nietzschean will to power, with a dose of philosophical ignorance sprinkled in.
There is one commentary on this at Zelman Partisans, but I thought I would add by saying that rights have as their origin and basis the Almighty. The writer doesn’t even know against whom to turn his shots. Libertarianism has nothing at all to do with this, as they don’t ground rights in God’s law-word.
He is confusing the ground of rights with the recognition of those rights by the state. It matters in the extremum, because a man will answer for both his beliefs and his actions and behaviors in eternity.
If you believe that your rights have as their basis something other than the eternal, immutable law-word of God, that is a cosmic offense to your maker because He has ordered you to take every thought captive to the obedience of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 10:5). Your beliefs matter that much. God cares what you think and believe.
He also cares what your “rulers” think and believe, and their actions don’t have an iota of effect on God’s decrees. Oh to be sure, that may mean war on your rulers if the oppression becomes severe enough, but it matters whether that is a just war, you see, because you will answer to your maker.
Eternity, and the state of your soul there. That’s why this is important. If a piece of paper, honored or not, is the basis for what you do, then you are to be pitied. But if the basis for what you believe and do is the Holy Writ, God is on your side, and there can be no better place to be, dear reader.
On July 13, 2020 at 9:55 am, blake said:
A “right” conferred through passage of a law that was written by men means that someone else is being enslaved in order for one to have that “right.” See: Obamacare.
A true right cannot be denied, removed or created by fiat of man.
Men cannot take away a right, men can only punish the exercise thereof.
On July 13, 2020 at 10:03 am, craig said:
It’s this kind of sloppy back-and-forth between appeals to morality and appeals to legality that shows how little clarity of comprehension is ever attained now that education has become wholly secular.
If your rights are neither unalienable nor derived from the natural order of the universe — if they are only based on raw power — then there can be no moral critique of anything, full stop. The tyrant is simply an apex predator among mankind, not any more “immoral” in carrying out rape and pillage than a lion is immoral for eating gazelle. If the Chinese government wants to genocide the Uyghurs to clear land for Han expansion, and has the means to do so, then what secular moral argument exists against their carrying it out?
On July 13, 2020 at 4:22 pm, Hudson H Luce said:
Governments grant privileges and licenses, in the latter case, permission to do an action which is otherwise prohibited. Governments may recognize rights and allow their free exercise, but they do not grant them. The Bill of Rights is a list, a non-exclusive list, of rights which *pre-existed* the government, this one or any government, ever. The Bill of Rights doesn’t guarantee rights, either, and no government of men will long tolerate limits on its power, unless there is a significant counterbalance, which consists of a people with arms and the will to use them.
On July 13, 2020 at 8:40 pm, Henry said:
All Korwin is saying is that if you ‘have” a right but are successfully restricted from exercising it, do you really have it? In theoretical terms, probably. In practical terms, you’re screwed.
On July 13, 2020 at 9:16 pm, Herschel Smith said:
I know exactly what he’s saying. And he is wrong.
” … do you really have it?”
Yes. You do. When God judges you in eternity, it will have nothing to do with “theory.” Korwin and his ilk play the will to power with no comprehension of what that means in terms of just war, righteous behavior, the basis for your actions, and the ideas necessary to bring people along in understanding what they are and aren’t justified in doing.
He is a man who considers himself an island because his ethics are based on nothing whatsoever, as opposed to those who understand the value of community, the way to teach and train others, and why all of this is important.
In short, he is a simpleton, not a thinking man.
No one is “screwed” if God is on your side. It matters how a man lives, how he dies, and what he believes and thinks while he is alive.
On July 15, 2020 at 7:11 am, Sanders said:
You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
The common man is far better armed than he has ever been in history, yet is afraid to use those arms to not only maintain his rights, but to defend those rights.
On July 15, 2020 at 8:33 am, Herschel Smith said:
Why aren’t people getting this fundamental point?
You have the rights that God says you have. That makes fighting for them righteous.
On July 15, 2020 at 9:17 pm, Randolph Scott said:
^^^ this ^^^