s people. Therefore, we purged the key leaders above the rank of deacons in Protestant or Catholic churches and the wicked among the rest were put on trial. The general religious people were…put into prison camps [and given a chance to reform]…. We learned later that those of religion can do away with their old habits only after they have been killed.
Human Rights in North Korea
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But you need to tie this together with your post below, “Natural Rights”. It must mean something that, as so often happens, totalitarians do away with religious figures.
One possibility — The idea of natural rights becomes non-existent when religions are exterminated.
Just a thought.
Dom -
of liberal democratic rights stem from the existence of a Supreme Being. So, if you don’t believe in God you don’t believe in rights? Very strange. I can see the argument historically, but not philosophically. My point was that I thought since Kant we’d got past this, and could think of ourselves as moral agents without needing to bring God into it.
“The idea of natural rights becomes non-existent when religions are exterminated” – well, any society which has exterminated religion has already killed off human rights, as obviously a fundamental human right is to believe – or not believe – what you like. -
I’d argue that the Enlightenment’s great and enduring contribution to natural rights was the rifle.
I’d also argue that one clear advantage the religious types can claim in the field of “natural rights” is that their rules are absolute and permanent. They may absolutely and permanently enshrine passing fads from 2,000 years ago, but at least you know what you’ll be getting next week. What have the secularists got? Committees. Let’s face it, rights are abstractions. If you set the Great and the Good to the task of deciding what rights you have, they won’t hook up a cyclotron and come back with objective results. They’ll invent some rights instead, and then they’ll be changing their minds every year or two. How then do “natural rights” differ from any other laws? If they’re “natural”, how come they’re only permanent until somebody decides to change them?
The whole thing’s an absurdity. Yeah, it’s a useful one: If we all choose to take it seriously, life is much better for everybody (assuming we picked good rights). But why should we respect people’s rights in cases when we won’t get caught? Doubly so if it’s all just arbitrary stuff on paper, invented by bureaucrats or academics: When all mankind has an eternal and inviolable natural right to a minimum wage of US$9.37 (2005 dollars, adjusted for inflation) or some such thing, the fact that it’s arbitrary is just a bit too obvious.
If “natural rights” are to mean anything at all, they must not be items “about which reasonable people can disagree”. They must be immutable and permanent, and they must also be consistent with common sense. Religious belief may often be annoying and irrational, but it looks to me like the better tool for the job here.
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