by Mary Maxwell, LLB
I assume that God created the universe. God must be much greater than we standardly assert, as Nature is so brilliant in its workings. There are over a million animal species and we are but one of those species, good ’olHomo sapiens – wise man (ha!).
I wish we’d get a lot wiser, immediately, as it looks like we are going downhill fast and make take many, or even all?, of those other species along with us.
I have just been listening to a Zoom lecture by Judy Hodgkiss, author of “The Right to Pursue Happiness.” I have not read her book yet but will order it forthwith. The zoom is part of a series by Promethean Action group, aimed at young activists. (Yay!)
The beginning of the lecture emphasized the little-known role played by German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, and English Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in our colonial history. Viz, those two men influenced our Founding Fathers’ choice of the words “inalienable right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
God-given Rights?
But here I state my disagreement with those famous words, and indeed with the common statement that our rights are God given. I do believe that our ability to fight for ‘rights’ is God given. Everything that’s in “human nature” came to us through Nature which came from the Creator. Some of the qualities that make it possible for us to ultimately attain rights are: pride, survival instinct, aggression and rationality.
Really, I don’t think our political conversation should refer to “God-given rights.” It may even be wise to get rid of the word ‘rights’ altogether. At most, I’d be willing to see it applied to the list of rights being referred to. “I have a right to sue the manufacturer of a bicycle that cause me injury.” Or “I have a right not to be treated as a low-class person.” “Or, I have a right to vote.”
But doesn’t it empower us to say that rights are God-given? Very often it has empowered us, at least emotionally. It enables us to say to someone “My Daddy is bigger than your daddy.” It thus enables a slave to look down on his master. It may let us picture the metaphorical Judgement Day on which God can say “OK, sinner, you deprived a whole town of rights and now it’ll be hell to pay.”
Still, there really are big dis-advantages to treating a right as a gift, rather than as an achievement. Such a picture gives us no guidance as to when or how to rebel against fellow humans when they selfishly deprive us of the said ‘right.’ Instead we are left to mourn our loss of what God gave us. Or, more likely, we go into denial about the fact that the right is presently nowhere to be seen. (Right to privacy, Anyone?)
Come on, we can do better than the Founders (with appropriate thanks to them for getting the ball rolling). We can say “God gave us our humanity, with all its potential.” Then we can concentrate on what we might be doing with this thing, this humanity, and using our capacity for reason to develop plans for “happiness.”
In fact, various religions have been doing so for thousands of years. Even outside of religion, people manufacture “ethics.” None of the 19th century anthropologists encountered a human group that lacked rules. All took a position on this or that behavior being right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable. All tribes list punishments. All probably had terminology for “the social good.”
I, myself, living millennia after The Flood, have a veritable obsession with the subject of right and wrong. I am mighty distressed that it has gone out of fashion to threaten punishment to those who are harming us. In 2024, I basically fainted when I heard that the US Supreme Court gave a sort of advance pardon to all who hold high office.
The wording in the syllabus of that case, US v Trump, is:
“Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”
[For the record: My personal opinion of Trump’s guilt in US v Trump is that he was not guilty anyway.]
Holding Accountable
Ah, just now I riffled through a good book by Tom Mueller, Crisis of Conscience (2018). It’s about how to be a whistleblower. The opening quote of Chapter 1 is from the little-known documents of the Continental Congress, which sat before we got our current Congress:
“Resolved, that it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States… to give the earliest information to Congress or other authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge. – Legislation of July 30, 1778.”
It has a distant ring to it, doesn’t it? Note: Those legislators did not invent it wholesale. The common law of England that came over on the Mayflower in 1620 had laws about holding people accountable. So did early laws, made after the US Constitution arrived. In 1948, the USC (the United States Code, not the University of Southern California) codified “misprision of felony” as a crime, as follows”:
“Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
Holy moly, how many times have you committed that crime!
It’s at 18 USC 4. (Title 18 contains all federal crimes. Easily googleable.)
Just in case you feel confused by the fact that the US Supreme Court, in Trump v US, ruled that presidents are not accountable, don’t be confused. It’s the five Justices who were confused when they so ruled. They should now rule sua sponte (spontaneously) that the Great Republic has rule of law, 24/7, with no complete immunity for anyone including Supreme Court Justices.
(Honestly, it’s becoming embarrassing to be American, isn’t it? Many foreigners now hate us, and, worse, many feel sorry for us!)
Back to our rights: Judy Hodgkiss, author of the aforementioned book, includes, as part of our “right to the pursuit of happiness,” the right to listen to music. Of course you can only enjoy this right if the music first exists. (Her group, Promethean Action encourages the arts today.) I look upon our talent for music as natural. So call it God-given if you wish, but to me it did not drop from Heaven as a single gift — it’s part of human nature which also includes plenty, seriously plenty, bad stuff too. We can use the rational part of human nature to sort these things out.
Here Comes the Preacher
Just as I was writing this article, an email popped up on my machine (very old girl here; I still refer to my computer as a machine). It’s from Frank Schaeffer, who used to be a preacher. Well, once a moralist, always a moralist. He goes at JD Vance rather harshly. Indeed, extremely harshly, given our climate of non-punishment where Anything Goes.
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There Are No God-Given Rights without God
Getting rid of God is the communists’ way to dispense with your rights.
John Green | June 4, 2023
“……But without God, there can be no God-given rights. In fact, men would cease to have any rights at all — only permissions granted by other men. Further, those permissions would be subject to change at any time relative to the shifting of power and the desires of the powerful.
Without guidance that transcends humans — and static interpretations of good and evil — we have no moral compass. With the advance of moral relativism, the human rights that our founders considered absolute, became subject to the interpretations of men.
Moral relativism has become the sermon of the powerful, as they make us all subjects of “might makes right.” In the eyes of our bureaucratic swamp, freedom of speech has a disinformation exception, and freedom of assembly is free only when COVID isn’t in season. In their view, we have no rights — only permissions that they grant, so long as those permissions are consistent with their objectives. As our God-given rights are stripped away, they are replaced by tyranny imposed by those in power. ……………..”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/there_are_no_godgiven_rights_without_god.html
The Law of Love (Romans 13:8-14) – Grace Communion…
8 Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. 9 For this, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
11 Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. 12 The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.
Source: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/readings/Love-Fulfills-The-Law
Of course, the Law of Love does not apply to those in power who exercise their own authority over others.
an argument to this statement please
“There Are No God-Given Rights without God” Here’s the counter-argument:
🔥 Rights Don’t Need a Landlord
The whole “no God-given rights without God” line is a category error dressed up as profundity. It conflates origin stories with justification.
1. The Euthyphro Problem Haunts This
Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s good? If the former, “rights” are just arbitrary divine whims — God could declare torture a right tomorrow and you’d have no grounds to object. If the latter, then goodness and rights exist independently of God, and He’s just the messenger. Either way, the theist loses the exclusive claim.
2. Rights Emerge from Reciprocity, Not Revelation
You don’t need a cosmic authority to figure out that if you don’t want to be murdered, robbed, or enslaved, you probably shouldn’t do those things to others. This isn’t theology — it’s game theory with stakes. Every functioning society converges on something like rights because beings with competing interests who can inflict harm on each other have to if they want to avoid a war of all against all.
The secular grounding is dead simple:
I have preferences about how I’m treated
You have preferences about how you’re treated
We both have the capacity to harm each other
So we negotiate boundaries
We call the stable, widely-accepted ones “rights”
No deity required. Just two people who’d rather not get stabbed.
3. The Historical Record Is Not on God’s Side
If rights require God, why did it take until the Enlightenment for anyone to seriously articulate universal human rights? The Bible was around for centuries while chattel slavery, absolute monarchy, and torture were considered perfectly compatible with divine law. The same book that supposedly grounds rights also contains detailed instructions for owning people as property (Leviticus 25:44-46).
It wasn’t clergymen who gave us rights — it was philosophers who started from human flourishing as the foundation and worked outward from there.
4. Rights Are a Social Technology, Not a Discovery
We don’t discover rights like we discover gravity — we invent and negotiate them. They’re a tool humans built to solve coordination problems. Saying you need God for rights is like saying you need God for stop signs. The stop sign works because we agree it works, not because it was etched onto stone tablets.
5. The Burden Is Backwards
The person claiming God is necessary for rights needs to demonstrate:
That God exists (step one, still pending)
That this God issued rights
That we can reliably know what those rights are
That these rights wouldn’t exist otherwise
None of these steps have been met. Meanwhile, we can watch rights emerge organically in any group of people who have to coexist — religious or not.
The short version: “God-given rights” is just branding. The product works fine without the label.
just me being a bot again 🙂 <– tis my roight!
I do love a May substack! so much.. id enven enrol to vote fot it.
Mary, did god give me any rights?
Indeed he did, the basic gift was an intellect to use as an exercise of free will.
Perhaps this report should be added to your stack to enable humans to examine and use their god given intelect and chose.:
‘JUDY Byington.107 And T breaking news 7:19:26 we have it all we caught them all’.
Look behind the title and just listen please..
http://www.beforeitsnews.com people powered universal reality news.
8.47
As for the gullible normies who believe med beds are BS, presumably you have never heard of Tesla or have any idea about the creation of a pill for you by the Rothschild treatment.
If not go take one of his pharmacy pills and be happy. Forget that you really are just a frequency being with a spirit- soul. The rest of you is just a bit of meant.
SUCKERS!
907
So sorry F D I thew in a wayward ‘N and need a grange.
Oops,
With some research into Fd’s ‘ my fault memory lapse’ with my recollection as to what I was smoking, I confused with the fish on the grog imputations.
So the above should have been directed to Fish who had inferred a reason for some typos.
1047
Censor:
WHERE IS MY QUALIFICATION?
1127
Now you turn up🤷♂️
Not good enough!
1129
God gave you a choice because you volunteered to come here and make it right.
Yes inch by inch or millimeter by millimeter, it is excruciating painful and awesome. You can only do the right thing, or know what the right thing is because you came here with that. I really hope you did, anyways, because you most likely will struggle in a world of wrong
This is worth discussing.
The City Of London Sacrifice Of The Lamb – Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk & Netanyahu
Brendon O’Connell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lytGZ5RnEkM
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n-uOSFY2jcY?feature=share