Man's Rights Without God's Existence

If God does not exist, then where do the "rights of man" come from? Glenn Beck, a good man with good intentions, said that without God man's rights would not exist because God gave them to us.

But the American Founders believed in something called "individual sovereignty" and that concept has as much validity with or without God. Natural rights are those said to belong to every human being by virtue of his rationality. This is because no man can have the right to decide another man's use of his will, and it is free will that is always at the center of the concept of "individualism".

It was Aristotle who termed man "the rational animal." Reason was a natural virtue, given by nature to every man and woman of normal mental capacity. Some people have better than normal, some people have less than normal and must be cared for. But virtues came in two varieties, according to Aristotle: mental, such as perception, abstraction, analytics, conceptualization, etc.

The second kind of virtue he termed "habitualized." This is virtue of character. This virtue is habitualized because only by acting on one's moral beliefs and practicing the principles in all our affairs can we gain what we call our "character" and our "integrity."

"Character" is the specific manner in which we practice the principles of our virtues, which by the way, is the practice of morals. Practicing principles of virtues is the practice of morality.

"Integrity" is the virtue itself of being consistent in the practice of one's morals. If we are seen to be relativists, doing one thing this time, another thing another time, and we cannot be counted on to be the same person each and every time, if we cannot be counted on for consistency in our means and objectives, if we cannot be predictible in the sense that our character can be known, then we have no integrity.

The life of habitualized virtues as the "central issue for Aristotle is the question of character or personality — what does it take for an individual human being to be a good person?" Character and integrity "must essentially involve the entire proper function of human life." Britannica

"One leading commentator says you could easily think of Aristotle as a supercilious prig. Aristotle purports to set out for us how we should live. I suppose this is consistent with his being a prig. But it is also what a lot of people think philosophy should be providing. Not logic chopping, not playing with bizarre ideas which bear very little relation to the world we have to live in, but offering wisdom, serious, considered, guidance on what life is all about and how we should deal with it." Aristotle's Ethics

How does this correspond with "natural rights" as "sovereignty" which pertains to what the law can and ought to guarantee, when the proposition is made that God did not provide us with these rights?

Let me reverse the question and ask: Why are natural rights with the attendent sovereignty of the individual only possible when given by God?

These two questions can be reconciled with the premise that "rights from God" and "natural rights" come from the same place; and, that one camp says if we don't accept rights as a gift from God we have nothing to be responsible toward, while the other camp says it is individual men to whom we must be responsible because if one wishes one's own sovereignty to be respected one must then respect the same sovereignty as it applies to another and all individuals.

Ayn Rand Predicted Today's World

Atlas Shrugged Tops Amazon's Bestseller List --Earlier this year Ayn Rand'sprophetic novel Atlas Shrugged was selling at triple the rate it soldat in the beginning of 2008. Now the novel is soaring to even greaterheights, and its trade paperback edition is currently in first place in the Classics category on Amazon.com's best-seller list forsales in the United States. The 50th anniversary mass-market paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged ranks as #2 and the trade paperback Centennial edition ranks as #3. For several weeks Atlas Shrugged has been holding steady in the top 10 best-sellers in the broader United States Literature and Fiction category, and as of the writing of this release, different editions of the novel stand at #3, #5 and #6 in Amazon'sranking. http://www.aynrand.org/site/R?i=JlsV9sK8abvp7QWvpCXtNg..http://www.aynrand.org/site/R?i=dqrrXDpVYiPsqpgXhwAlCg..

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Rights and Personal Sovereignty

What is missing from the Constitution

is a provision that explicitly states

the derived nature of "individual sovereignty".

We Have Indentured Posterity

With Our Debt

"We think experience has proved it safer for the mass of individuals composing the society to reserve to themselves personally the exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent..." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816.

The "mass" of individuals is what the framers of the Constitution called "We, the People," and wrote that the Constitution was "to provide for the common Defense" and to "promote the general Welfare."

Never did the Founders dream that what was "common" among them--their defense, their promotion of security, their lives, their liberties, and their pursuit of happiness--would congeal under the nationalism of Federal laws into something called "the common good."

They could not have conceived it, because they could not conceive that the individualism promoted by securing a nation would be turned on its head, turned into the denial of individualism in order to promote the security of everyone but the individual.

The "common good" is nothing but the result of either democracy by majority in which that majority overwhelms the minority rather than protecting it; or it is the republicanism of our representative government becoming the majority. Once case in point is how Washington ignored the people's wishes in this bail-out mess. Poll after poll demonstrated how Americans were against the bail-out, repeatedly telling Washington to let the free market fix the problems caused by Washington.

The people knew there would be hard times. The people know that harder times are now to come because Washingon ignored their pleas to let the banks fail and to let Detroit fail. Why are the harder times to come?

A senator on live TV was heard to say just yesterday that all this debt that the Federal government has taken on in the name of the economic security of the people, will be paid for by the generation now being born and by the children born of that generation.

But what of the debt we must incur before the first-born generation of indebted children can begin to pay off our debts? That will be at least twenty years, if not forty. In that amount of time there will be literally quadrillions, not just trillions, more dollars spent in the red. Then it will be up to the third, forth, even the fifth generations to come to pay off that debt. How will they do it?

They will not be able to pay it off until it is recognized that the free market, when allowed to fail, will heal itself. That is the purpose of capitalism. No capitalist ever thought he should not "try, try again," except in the case of bureaucratic roadblocks and "progressive" taxes that took from him when he made money the very profits needed to make more money.

"Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted." “The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness; Ayn Rand

Since individuals may do anything whatsoever that does not violate the rights of others, keeping his profits is within his own rights. Proper taxes are those which go to pay for government infrastructure. Improper taxes are the debts incurred by "the people" when government prints even one dollar that is not backed by the security of goods already manufactured. Since Nixon took us off the gold standard, and since the dollar is backed only by the Gross National Product (GNP), and since all the manufactured money for the bailout is credit in the name of the hope of future production that can back up the debt, such credit is immoral of any government to print, and should be illegal if it is not already.

What is missing from the Constitution is a provision such as the one below, a provision that explicitly states the derived nature of "individual sovereignty" in order to prevent our government from acting in the name of the "people" when the "people" is merely the "mass of individuals," not some organic whole made of everyone now living and yet to be born for generations.

Such a provision would read something like this: [from Nation's Press Institute]

"Reserved to each Citizen of the several States, and to each citizen of the United States, the unalienable and rightful powers of said Citizens as defined by Natural Law shall not be abridged except to conform where necessary to the functioning of the common sovereignty of said Citizens. 'Natural Law' shall be defined as the right of action by any and all individuals when those actions do not violate the same right of action of any other individual. 'Common sovereignty' shall be defined as those minimal powers deemed necessary for the maintenance of a democratically operated republican government to establish justice, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. 'General Welfare' shall be defined as the mitigating powers of the common sovereignty over individual sovereignty. 'Liberty' shall be defined as the unalienable and rightful powers of each individual Citizen as is given at birth by the fruits of nature and of nature's god, except where mitigated by the common sovereignty, which mitigation shall constitute the general Welfare."

This provision would do much to restore American law and jurisprudence to the Originalist position. From there, changes could be made to the Constitution where "the mass of individuals" saw a need for it. The "exercise of all rightful powers" is the right of every individual under any doctrine of natural law. "The exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent..." is a matter of prudence and justice under the law of men. We are engaged as a nation in the politics of pragmatism, which is neither prudent, nor just, denying the exercise of any rightful power because to deny one is to deny the principle that makes all of them "rightful."

Note: I am withdrawing my membership in the Center for Inquiry. It's liberalism, it's humanism, and its subjectivity are beyond the pale, when considering such items as this, from CFI Chigago:

The Center For Inquiry/Chicago is pleased to present:
Re-Framing the Educational Debate: Teaching and Freedom
with Guest Presenter Dr. William Ayers

Not only is this the very same Ayers at the center of controversy in the Obama for President debate, the CFI Chigago, after listing his many academic milestones and failing to mention his domestic terrorism background, has only this comment to make: "He is an inspiration to a generation of young teachers."

The Center for Inquiry seems to have no standards for their behavior or their moral choices for investigation of any subject except that of secularity. Secularity is not a moral choice. It is the division of one's life--or the life of an organization--into the religious and the non-religious, or the outright rejection of religiosity; and it is the separation of church of state.

I reject outright any faith and religiosity in my life; but I also reject the presentation in the name of "secularity" of terrorists as legitimate objects of veneration, respect, and inspiritation.

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