Where Do Human Rights Come From

It seems the fastest way to get people to scream and holler is to take away their rights.  No matter what you believe if you feel your rights or the rights of someone you love are being trampled on and being treated unfairly then we speak up.

This could take place on the playground, in a work place, church, school or government.  A question comes to my mind,  “why do people value human rights so much for?”

This should be a lead in question with an atheist when in a discussion about God, faith etc….  Let them ponder on that for awhile and then ask for a response.  A second follow up question is where the title of this blog gets its name, “Where do human rights come from?”

Have you ever stopped to truly think about this?  Do our rights come from our Constitution?  Is that  why we have rights?  What about the people who live in nations with no such thing as a Constitution? Is right for a leader to oppress his people just because the don’t have Constitution?   No, of course not.

So our rights don’t come from our Constitution.  If you read our Constitution you find that it was put place for the Liberty, peace and the prosperity of our nation.  It really doesn’t explain why individuals should have rights.  But our Constitution does not stand alone, no it stands upon the Shoulders of another Document:  The Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence tells us explicitly why humans  beings have rights regardless of whether they live in a country with a despicable ruler or a benevolent Constitution such as our own.  Let me quote it for you:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are CREATED equal, that they are ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR with certain UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Our rights are given by God.  No man or government has the right to take them away.  But an atheist has to make the case that an accident in the Universe, a mindless beginning, a purposeless start has a objective, rationale meaning.  If our beginning has no purpose, then we have no purpose,  If our beginning had no value, then we have no value.  Any value we pretend to have is just that pretend, because the Universe just doesn’t care.

The great atheist and mathematician Bertrand Russel understood this and rightly concluded:

“[Man] … his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins… “A Free Man’s Worship’ (1903). In Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (1967), 107

And to close this section of thought I quote the great atheist:  Friedrich Nietzsche : “equality is a lie concocted by the inferior people who arrange themselves in herds to overpower those who are naturally superior to them, the morality of equal rights is herd mentality because it opposes the cultivation of superior individuals it leads to the corruption of the human species.”  

This is a Naturalist an Atheist who says that the “morality of Human Rights corrupts humanity.”  

He is taking the logical outworking of Naturalism/Atheism and honestly concluding that Human Rights do not come from Evolution, in fact right, rational and honest thinking always leads to this same conclusion.  So I ask once again:  “Where Do Human Rights Come From……..?  God our Creator.

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