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Originally Posted by raytri
Whose God gets to decide what those rights are?
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God Ray... Who is recognizing him is irrelevant.
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No, absent God it is *humans* that determine what human rights are. Through reason.
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False... Humans can advance a privilege which may tolerate a given activity, or they can suppress an activity given sufficient power to do so... Again as is your wont you confuse human rights with civil rights...
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A given government may or may not agree, and may have the power to suppress certain rights within its jurisdiction. But government is not the final arbiter of what constitutes a "human right."
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This is my point... Congrats... you made it.
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Can humans disagree on what fundamental rights are? Of course. Indeed, that definition has changed throughout history. That's where the marketplace of ideas comes in. But it is humans, not governments, that make the arguments and win the philosophical battles. All a government can do is subscribe, or not.
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What humans feel about human rights has no bearing on what human rights are what so ever. There is only one human right and that is the right to pursue fulfillment of the life endowed by God... that right comes with the sacred responsibility to not exercise that right to the detriment of another's right. That's it... period.
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Jefferson was human. And while he used "endowed by the Creator" to place the source of rights above the power of any government to *legitimately* infringe, the actual rights themselves were reasoned out by humans. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are nowhere spelled out as rights in the Bible or any other holy book. They sprang from the pen of Jefferson, informed by spirited human debate over the centuries.
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There is nothing in the bible regaring gravity, quarks, supernova, ebola, The HIV or pretty much most of it... it being the Universe.
Jefferson spoke to the ultimate authority of LEGITIMATE RIGHTS... The ONLY RIGHTS... HUMAN RIGHTS. All other rights are the intellectual flatulence of man which sits on the whimsy of a popular majority and isn't worth the paper it's written upon. In contrast to the endowed rights of humanity to pursue the fulfillment of their God given rights... which is eternal and rest upon an authority well in excess of any government of man.