I'm the only non-religious person in my class, and my teacher knows that, so after the lecture she called me up to her desk and wanted my opinion on where I thought our basic rights came from, since I don't directly believe in a God.

The question really made me think about it...before the Constitution, what are the basis of what we believe to be our natural rights, from a viewpoint of someone who is not religious?

I really would like to hear some answers to this..

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I love life, but life has a boyfriend.
http://www.last.fm/user/chelseastar

PS speak up in your class. Don't let the religious fanatics keep you down. Fuckers.

Post edited at 2:25 pm on Nov. 10, 2009 by agerask

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I like to take naps because when you wake up, you forget all
the crap going wrong in your life, for a whole ten seconds.

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How about from the natural rights endowed upon all human beings? John Locke, the REAL founding father of our American governmental system, postulated secular beginnings. Not divinely ordained ones.

PS speak up in your class. Don't let the religious fanatics keep you down. Fuckers.

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Oh, I do speak up in there. And its not like their a bunch of fanatics, but they're all just Christians. Not hard-core or anything.

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I love life, but life has a boyfriend.
http://www.last.fm/user/chelseastar

So in a non-religious sense we'd have to consider that humans obviously like to be happy, and that they also usually have at least some psychological drive to help other people, as well (again, this is easily attributable to evolution).  So both of these things cause humans to want to live in a society that has a reasonable level of average happiness.

So in short, there are no "natural" rights, only the rights that a group of humans collectively decides to grant to each individual member.  These rights do not need to appeal to any God or natural force, they only need to appeal to the individuals who make them.

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http://www.golivewire.com/forums/peer-yatapys-support-a.html

Beyond that, this varies pretty extensively from person to person. My own opinion is that rights don't inherently exist, but are useful social constructs--upon them we can build social philosophies that well help to produce a better overall quality of life. That doesn't mean that you have to believe that a god gave you rights in order to believe that they exist; there are plenty of atheist philosophers who still think humans inherently have rights. Kantian ethics, for example, would say that people have certain rights by virtue of being rational creatures with their own will; because humans can think logically and decide what to do, they inherently have a right to autonomy, for example. Along this line of thought, a lot of people would argue that the qualities that make us human--being able to reason and having free will--also give us certain natural rights.

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"Hey, that's not very nice, Mayor--
just because a person's gay doesn't mean he's a fag!"
-Stan

Scenario A:
- Progenitors of the US Constitution believed the rights they established with it were innate, given by the supreme god, who DOES exist.
- Constitutional rights come from those who wrote the Constitution.
Scenario B:
- Progenitors of the US Constitution believed the rights they established with it were innate, given by the supreme god, who does NOT exist.
- Constitutional rights come from those who wrote the Constitution.