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Greetings:<br><br>
Simply saying that God grants us rights without giving any other reason
than "God just does it" commits the fallacy of circular
reasoning. Much more needs to be said.<br><br>
God-given unalieanable rights are in the Declaration of Independence not
the Constitution, the only document that serves as the framework for the
laws of our secular society. Does it really need repeating that God
is not mentioned in the Constitution?<br><br>
Even in the Declaration Jefferson identifies the source of our rights as
"the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," a phrase that cannot be
found in any text of Christian theology of which I'm familiar.<br><br>
In his book "Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins,
Philosophy, and Theology" (U of Kentucky Press, 1998), Allen Jayne
concludes that Jefferson is referring to the God of deism, an impersonal
being that is essentially nature itself. (The exact source appears to be
the deist Lord Bolingbroke.) More generally Jefferson is referring to
what is called "natural law theory," in which any human being
could derive moral laws using reason alone. Lucky for us, divine
revelation is not required.<br><br>
So the answer to the question how atheists fit in is easy: the ones I
know are rational beings and they seem to know the difference between
right and wrong, sometimes better that their Christian
neighbors.<br><br>
Even the Apostle Paul acknowledged that the heathen can know the moral
law (Roman 2:14), but that does not mean that he can be saved by
it. (Paul would have been very amused by Jerry Falwell's
"Moral Majority.") Thomas Aquinas also believed that atheists,
using their own reason, could know the moral law and thereby derive a
theory of rights from that knowledge.<br><br>
Therefore, the Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us a Constitution
whereby rational beings can acknowledge and uphold basic human rights and
make good laws. No appeal God is necessary.<br><br>
Nick Gier<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">I owe no particular allegiance
to the past, so the reconstructed<br>
intentions of our founders aren't keenly relevant to me. The
nation<br>
they conceived and which was born of their disparate intentions has<br>
fortunately evolved, so that being a white male property owner is no<br>
longer a requirement to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship.<br><br>
As a complete secularist, I don't include God or the supernatural in<br>
any equation that governs my life. Further, as I have
indicated<br>
above, that some of our founders did -- arguably the majority -- is
of<br>
only historical interest. "Rights" are something that
humans invented<br>
that they sometimes wax poetic about. For rights to exist in any
form<br>
other than the uselessly ephemeral, they must be enforced and<br>
maintained. Deities don't do the enforcing, people do. In
this<br>
modern era, governments are the primary instruments of enforcement.<br>
Theoretically, this isn't a bad thing, as governments are supposed
to<br>
derive their power from the will of the people.<br><br>
I don't want to live in a white Christian hegemony, even if that's<br>
what this nation was in times of yore (yesterday, relatively<br>
speaking), even if that was the intention of our founders.
Humanity<br>
has evolved beyond that. "Rights" are now extended
to blacks and<br>
women and to nearly everyone who was previously dispossessed due to<br>
the superstitions and prejudices that were acceptable -- or the norm<br>
-- in bygone eras. Too many religious institutions
dogmatically<br>
preserve all that was bad about our past.<br><br>
More people understand this than not, even if only intuitively.
That<br>
enshrines it, for me, as a worthy democratic principle.<br><br>
Democracy before faith? That gets my vote, especially when the<br>
alternative is a return to a medieval brand of Christianity on the<br>
shores of a country that I love, however critical I may be of
it.<br><br>
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<font size=2>"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the
application of it to human affairs."<br>
--Ralph Waldo Emerson<br><br>
"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings
who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."<br>
--Mohandas Gandhi<br><br>
"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot
be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each
part by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on
the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our
intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science,
religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its
various parts." --Ma</font><font size=1>x Planck<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/home.htm<br>
</a>208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
<a href="http://www.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/ift.htm" eudora="autourl">
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