What's behind Barack Obama, NBC, Harry Reid and a host of other progressives editing God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, and public discourse in general?
Simply put, get rid of God (or The Creator, or Divine Providence if you prefer), and you eradicate the concept of natural rights. Erase our natural rights, and you destroy the foundation upon which rests our constitutional republic. Progressives hate the concept of natural rights as espoused by our founding fathers, because it stands in the way of their grandiose master plan to remake society in their own twisted image.
Awhile back, a liberal blogger said a very ignorant thing:
There is no such thing as "God given rights" because if we returned to the original state of nature, or that which was "God given" we would find ourselves bound only by our own personal power, our conscience, and or by forces superior to our own.The first sentence is incoherent, and the second absurd. They cannot be defended. The first sentence is either nonsensical or it contradicts the author's thesis. It is so poorly written that a sane person cannot tell what was intended.
The rights that we enjoy today are man made rights; and as such are not "natural rights" nor are they permanently fixed.
The second sentence is absurd. We get our rights from man? OK. So if "man" decides to enslave all bloggers then it's OK? If man grants rights, he can take them away. This explains liberals' infatuation with strongmen like Mussolini, as well as uber-liberal Tom Friedman's current love affair with the Red Chinese politburo. It also explains how 20th century statism was able to kill over 100 million people.
The writer didn’t even cite a philosophical work to defend his unsubstantiated claim. I know why. No credible thinker could defend this. Even if there were someone loony enough to try to defend such a preposterous supposition, it would be written in incomprehensible Cornell West psychobabble.
American liberalism is a hopeless, self-contradictory tangle, an intellectual cul-de-sac. In contrast, our Natural Rights, as enunciated by our founding fathers, are axiomatic:
"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." (Declaration of Independence)Yes, we have a social contract called the US Constitution, but our rights do not emanate from that document. They are natural rights that preexist and supersede man-made institutions.
Natural Law -- Our Foundation
Natural Law is a philosophy, a theory. As such, it is open to debate and question, as is Christianity and global warming. Natural Law is the philosophical foundation of our constitutional republic, and today it stands in stark contrast to the central economic planning and social tinkering of progressives.
Jonathan Dolhenty explains:
What do we mean by "natural law"? In its simplest definition, natural law is that "unwritten law" that is more or less the same for everyone everywhere.Banish God, and you destroy the concept of Natural Rights. Without natural rights, the US Constitution is a worthless piece of paper. This opens the gates for progressive hordes to storm the citadel of individual liberty, and that is the goal of those statists who are offended by free people exercising their God-given individual rights to shoot guns, drive gas guzzlers and live however they damn well please.
To be more exact, natural law is the concept of a body of moral principles that is common to all humankind and, as generally posited, is recognizable by human reason alone. Natural law is therefore distinguished from -- and provides a standard for -- positive law, the formal legal enactments of a particular society.
To sum it up, then, we can say that the natural law:
(Source: Radical Academy)
- is not made by human beings;
- is based on the structure of reality itself;
- is the same for all human beings and at all times;
- is an unchanging rule or pattern which is there for human beings to discover;
- is the naturally knowable moral law
- is a means by which human beings can rationally guide themselves to their good.
Such a free society is deeply offensive to the social engineers afflicted by Hayek's fatal conceit.
Further Reading:
Locke's Second Treatise Of Civil Government
The Principles of Natural and Politic Law
