Do Inalienable Rights Exist Without God

[VacantTheories]

I'm in a debate with a so-called Christian patriot and he says inalienable rights come from god and we cannot be true American patriots without believing in god, because god grants us inalienable rights!

How am I suppose to respond to this stupid person?
How do inalienable rights exist in the absence of god in America

Can atheist believe we have inalienable rights?
Is there anything wrong with believing different things?
Can people have different versions and beliefs of how we have rights?
Would several of you please give your answers to these questions for me so I can give a proper response when this comes up? :confused:
Thanks,

[Tim Cornelis]

All rights are socially constructed. The existence of God cannot be proven, therefore it cannot be proven that he has given rights, and even if it could, it does not follow we should implement the rights he has given us. Where are they written? Are they intrinsic to us? Impossible, rights are inherently external to people, they exist between people, socially. They can't be inalienable.

Anyway, don't waste your time with this person.

[cyu]

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/october/framing-persuasive-messages-101215.html

While most people's natural inclination is to make political arguments grounded in their own moral values, these arguments are less persuasive.

To be persuasive, reframe political arguments to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political positions.

Such reframed moral appeals are persuasive because they increase the apparent agreement between a political position and the target audience's moral values.

So you have to first determine what the purpose of your discussion is. Are you ultimately trying to prove / disprove God, while ignoring economic issues? Are you just want to talk about what people deserve, and it doesn't matter if the discussion passes through religion or not? Are you ultimately concerned with the formation of the economic system? Do you just want to score rhetorical points so you can feel good about yourself, or make them feel bad about themselves?

Anyway, if it were me, I would start from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology and go from there, but I may have different goals that you.

[Comrade #138672]

I'm in a debate with a so-called Christian patriot and he says inalienable rights come from god and we cannot be true American patriots without believing in god, because god grants us inalienable rights!Many unproven assumptions:

(1) There exists a god.
(2) Inalienable rights exist.
(3) Inalienable rights come from god.
(4) Without belief in god, you cannot believe in inalienable rights.
(5) It is desirable to be an American patriot.


How am I suppose to respond to this stupid person?
How do inalienable rights exist in the absence of god in AmericaInalienable rights do not exist. It takes effort to enforce rights.


Can atheist believe we have inalienable rights?Sure. Atheists can be wrong, too.


Is there anything wrong with believing different things?Like what?


Can people have different versions and beliefs of how we have rights?Obviously they can.


Would several of you please give your answers to these questions for me so I can give a proper response when this comes up? :confused:
Thanks,You should not expect your Christian patriotic friend to be reasonable. He will probably suffer from a heavy confirmation bias, so he will find it difficult to consider the possibility that no gods exist, that rights have to be enforced by society, etc. He will probably not want to leave his comfort zone, where everything is guaranteed, because god said so.

[Zoop]

A right, as it exists today, is a codified observation based on what is deemed to be good (right to free speech, right to bodily autonomy etc).

They are constructions, obviously. Rights don't exist in the external world. They are just recognitions of what we should and shouldn't do, based on moral sentiments of what is right and wrong. They therefore don't have to be codified, or enforced by the state.

I could say that women should be allowed free access to abortion facilities. I could also say that women have a right to access abortion facilities freely. Same thing.

This is what most people mean when they talk about rights.

[OGG]

Tell him that's it blasphemy to say that God gave Rights to the USA. Appears nowhere in scripture.

[Thirsty Crow]

How am I suppose to respond to this stupid person?
How do inalienable rights exist in the absence of god in America

Well, the answer is they don't.

The point being that anyone seriously arguing for any kind of inalienable rights depends on a transcendental framework which can "work" either by dragging God into it, or, and this is much more tempting today, some mystical Nature which is just as a transcendental thing as God.

Either that, or you can shift the debate and argue for rights as social conventions that regulate the relationships between people. The idea then would be that some of those are to be considered very important and "inalienable" in the sense that no political organization of human community should abolish it.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I'm in a debate with a so-called Christian patriot and he says inalienable rights come from god and we cannot be true American patriots without believing in god, because god grants us inalienable rights!

How am I suppose to respond to this stupid person?
How do inalienable rights exist in the absence of god in America

Can atheist believe we have inalienable rights?
Is there anything wrong with believing different things?
Can people have different versions and beliefs of how we have rights?
Would several of you please give your answers to these questions for me so I can give a proper response when this comes up? :confused:
Thanks,

Of course you can't be a true American patriot without believing in God and his fellow spooks, The American Nation and The Invisible Hand of the Market. But socialists aren't patriots.

And as links says, it's impossible to have timeless "rights", "morals" and so on without some sort of deity. So what? What good have timeless rights and morals done us? More often than not they're used to signify backwardness and oppression (the sacred right to private property, "human dignity" that compels to homophobia, whatever).

[SonofRage]

Rights are just ideas. They don't exist until you assert them and are accepted by a society whether because they developed with culture, were enforced externally, or were fought for from below.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

[Luís Henrique]

I think much of this discussion is premised into a misunderstanding.

An "inalienable right" isn't a "natural right" or a "god given right". It is just a right that cannot be forfeited. Ie, my right to not be a slave cannot be given up by myself: I cannot sell myself into slavery. It is inalienable because of that, not because it inscripted in a supposed natural order of things, or because it was given to me by some deity. It is inalienable because the juridical order of the United States (and of the vast majority, if not the totality, of other bourgeois States) so determines. It has been alienable in the past (for instance, under the Roman Republic), when people could sell or give themselves as slaves, or offer their civil freedom as a warrant against loans.

The arguments within this thread are possibly valid against the idea of "natural" or "godgiven" rights, but they have little to do with "inalienable" rights. Of course, such confusion is also present in the argument discussed in the OP; but we should dispell the confusion.

Luís Henrique

[Invader Zim]

Of course. Inalienable rights exist only in as much that society chooses to provide them and deem them such, and construct its moral, ethical and legal codes and philosophies around them. For instance, we have a right not to be murdered because society deems it so; not because a mystical sky fairy ordered it thus or because nature determines it.

Note that, as Luis points out, 'inalienable' does not mean 'natural'. If society were to radically change then it is both plausible and logical that many rights once deemed inalienable would cease being such.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

It is a shame how the content of a piece of colonial independence propaganda has been taken on religious faith by Americans ever since. If these rights were so self evident and inalienable, why the fuck did the past millennia of humanity not recognize them? If a right is "inalienable" it means it can't be taken away, but these rights didn't exist for thousands of years. In what sense can they not be taken away? Are they just hidden somewhere? As for self-evident, clearly they were not so self-evident to the majority of people who existed before them. These were words used by rebels to challenge an authoritarian government, but they don't hold up to the scrutiny of reason - even a liberal must acknowledge that these rights are easily alienated and not so self evident.

[Rudolf]

Yeah, as has been said inalienable is not a synonym for natural. Although i don't think there are inalienable rights.

Luís Henrique's post (who i can never quote regardless of which post for some reason) reminds me how it's also important to differentiate between what is set out on a piece of paper and the practicalities of life.

To say you can't sell yourself into slavery has two meanings: the first judicial and the second material. Of course bourgeois states forbid the buying and selling of slaves, it is illegal. But in reality you can actually sell yourself into slavery in the west. You can't sell yourself into slavery with the state respecting that.

Yet then there becomes a matter of definitions. We are, as Marx put it, the free labourers (free to sell our labour power) but there becomes a point where we're not and this can be respected by the state. Suppose a debtors prison and prison labour. This is obviously a modern variation of debt bondage which has historically been the predominant form of slavery.
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[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

"Christian patriotism" has got to be premised on the most half-arsed reading of the New Testament ever. Consider throttling them to death with a copy of The True Levelers Standard Advanced while screaming "OMNIA SUNT COMMUNIA!!"
More seriously though, "rights" is a deeply problematic conceptual framework. "Rights" are not innate (though one might hope they speak to some deeply human inclinations as concerns, y'know, bodily autonomy, etc.) - they're a political construction. Blah blah blah - other people who have already said these things.

[Rafiq]

We should contest that "rights" can exist outside the framework of a society that must keep in check its own predispositions otherwise. "Rights" cannot exist outside the social antagonism, they are a bourgeois-formalist notion.

Rights represent an alien thing: one is to themselves, and are "in the right" to something, once one enters this domain of rights, they become a citizen, without them they are nothing. The assertion of a right, is juxtaposed to not having such a right, gaurunteed by the state apparatus.

Does a person have a "right" to eat in Communist? No, because this is not a "right"- it is not something that is permitted, but a given. Of course we can expect a web of restrictions and permissions in any society, but these would not necessarily be the equivalent of "rights", but things that belong to the category of self-discipline.

Of course we are for them, today, against the growing trend of 'dynamic' powers of China, Singapore to their citizens. But they are bourgeois notions.