Gary Childress wrote: ↑Fri Apr 30, 2021 5:10 am
Obviously, nothing is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to anyone not a US citizen.
But "guaranteeing" of rights is not the basis of rights. Locke showed that.
To say that basic human rights are "honoured" or "guaranteed by the State" is one thing; to say that they are "possessed" or "inherently deserved" is quite another.
People "posses" basic human rights, whether we deny the "honouring" or "guaranteeing" of those rights to them, or not. That's why, in rights talk, we say things like, "I have a right to...x.." even when the government is presently denying or refusing to acknowledge that right.
To put it another way,
basic human rights are
intrinsic. They are not
conferred rights. You possess basic human rights, even when others are violating them. That's why you can still claim you are owed them.
There are and have been societies where some people were slaves. So even a right to liberty isn't somehow sacrosanct.
Non-sequitur: it does not follow.
Take Southern slavery, in the years before the Civil War. How is it that we, the anti-slavery types" could speak of slavery as "unjust" or "a violation of human rights," if slaves had no right but those the Southern society conferred upon them? But you and I know their rights were not conferred rights; they were intrinsic. They were basic human rights. Human beings did not invent the principle that human beings ought to be free, just as we did not make ourselves.
Basic human rights are sacrosanct, because they transcend the State, and in fact, judge the State as just or unjust. Antebellum Southern society was unjust because it violated the intrinsic rights of human beings.
...does the Bible ever use the word "rights" anywhere in it?
It does, actually: admittedly, not always quite in the way Locke used the word, but similarly (John 1:12, for example). However, the concept of rights is there, and it's purely on deductions from there that Locke fashioned his explanation of rights.
However, you are correct in this much: if there were no God, and if we were created by cosmic accident, as Darwinism insists, then there is absolutely no ground for rights outside of the contingencies of society. All "rights" are conferred privileges given by particular societies for as long as those societies choose to. Societies come and go. Some have more power, and some have less. If there's no God, then rights also come and go at the whim of a local society -- and neither slaves, nor women, nor children, nor ordinary men have any basis for objection when those alleged "rights" are gone. That's just how societies and rights go.
