Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-GodGivenRights

Main entry

618. Q618/Q618

     god-given rights

     -> I don't think this is the same motif as natural law, although the concepts are somewhat related. this one is literal. this one is literally invoking a monotheistic or deistic god exactly like the label says. the natural law Item would be more philosophical and less describing a literal supernatural concept.

'The foundation of our democracy'

618. Q618/Q618 Rule of law is rule of morality / Rule of law comes from morality rather than from following what the laws say / Government neither invents nor grounds our rights (Barron) [1] -> this is one of the most bizarrely anarchist ways of interpreting laws I have ever seen.
     if laws are whatever is morally intuitive then why do we need lawyers? what's the deal with people having to spend years and years studying law just to understand it?? why are there judges?? if rule of law doesn't come from government then why do we need governments? wouldn't there inevitably come a point where everyone decided the United States government was immoral and abolished it because the Real rule of law in everyone's heads forbid a bunch of things the actual government was doing? wouldn't we eventually have to outlaw the United States government? where does it say that in the constitution? it'd seem to me the constitution assumes the United States republic will always be necessary. the US constitution doesn't contain any carve-out exception for abolishing itself like in early Bolshevik writings. but if "rule of law" genuinely came from morality rather than being a circular process between government and the people, that's exactly what you'd expect.
618. Q618/Q618 Brigham Young University -> wait. hold up. BYU? isn't that the mormon university? oh no it is. that link to mormon texts was totally unironic. okay.
618. Q618/Q618 Organized religion is the bedrock of our democracy (Bishop Robert Barron) [2] [3]
618. Q618/Q618 Thomas Jefferson and James Madison took it as fundamental to our democracy that our rights come from God / All men are endowed by their creator ... (Jefferson, U.S. Declaration of Independence) -> just from memory, I think that statement is at least half false. what about the Jefferson bible?
     the Declaration of Independence isn't good evidence. that had to speak for multiple people. that's like saying that if Trotsky signed a decision by Stalin's party that he believed in Stalinism. this implication that the Declaration of Independence was the opinion of one single man only and contained no concessions shows by itself that Barron has a questionable understanding of what democracy is.
     geez, no wonder the United States likes Trotsky and Bakunin so much. we all love the idea that when a whole room of representatives votes on something and millions of people in the surrounding country stand behind it that the opinion of one person can discard all of that if he believes he has better moral principles than every one of them. none of us actually believes in democracy. we believe in "my moral beliefs for everybody" -ocracy.
618. Q618/Q618 Thomas Jefferson and James Madison ... -> I looked around a bunch to try to find what Madison said about religion. [4] [5] the closest thing I could find to what he believed himself is a remark that sounded like "sure is weird how everyone is christians here, I guess things have to be designed around that"
     so: the statement is like a quarter right. James Madison agreed that the United States was founded on a population of Christians, so if you think the word "foundation" isn't too strong a word to describe that, then yeah, the United States was founded on Christians, concrete noun, not Christianity, abstract noun. but it's unclear if he agreed that that was an actual part of democracy or not. it's that separation between country characteristics and a Marxist process of socialist transition, only with a Liberal republic and the processes of that
618. Q618/Q618

     Voting doesn't create rights

     / Democratic processes don't create rights / If the government were the arbiter of our rights, then it could take them away [6] -> backhandedly true. he gets it. he gets how government works. when you create a republic and create government by the people, the rights it defends depend on what the people subjectively believe. if that isn't the case, then there isn't democracy.
     

     what's the difference between a world where all the laws are what the bible says and all the laws are what Stalin says? well, first of all the latter is going to be more logically coherent, but besides that. there's no difference. laws can't just be based on an eternal Ideal without actual input that comes from citizens and alters the content of the supposedly eternal Ideals. that's what democracy is. that's why the real CPSU had to bring in several people that would discuss issues and why there was a struggle between the Left Opposition and the rest of the party. because it was more democratic than God, that's why. this is the ideal central-government body, you may not like what peak performance looks like

618. Q618/Q618 Morality stops corrupt leaders / Only morality stops corrupt leaders / Without morality, leaders deify themselves and impose their will on the people without restraint / Republics must be based on inherent moral facts that exist before them; without morality or ethics (responsibility to God; responsibility to the governed), leaders deify themselves and impose their will on the people without restraint / The denial of God becomes the denial of rights (Barron) [7] ->
     great. so who's going to impose morality on the United States and get it out of Cuba? are you telling me that Vietnam and the anti-war movement in the United States won because they were the moral ones? are you telling me God wanted there to be Dengism in Vietnam? if God wanted there to be Dengism in Vietnam, then why wouldn't he want there to be Dengism in Cuba? what if God wants there to be Dengism in the United States? how would we know one way or the other?? is it just determined by whoever actually wins?? doesn't that just mean that God believes in Materialism? God should be a big fan of Marxism if that were the case.
     see, morality doesn't mean anything.
618. Q618/Q618 An inalienable right is any right that does not come from government -> this is a terrible definition. by this definition, international war is an inalienable right because it definitionally comes from a place outside a given nation-state and you can't stop it from happening. are atomic bombs an inalienable right? they weren't brought in by your government. nobody signed them into law, they just arrived. a government can't invent genocide on itself either. oh no. now it's inalienable as long as it's thoroughly extrajudicial and there aren't any laws protecting it. you'd think that would make it worse, not better. does genocide become more inalienable as everyday people become more enthusiastic about it and it comes less from any part of government? what if they say God told them to do it? how would you be able to tell whether that was true? is it true if they win?
618. Q618/Q618 Why do rights require government? / Why do human rights require government? / If rights are not created by government, then why is it necessary to create government? -> this seems stupid at first but really think about it for a while. if human rights ontologically exist without government, you always have them whether there is or isn't a government. so isn't creating government just making society worse given that it results in a lot of errors and separates people from their pre-existing rights? isn't the most logical thing to do to abolish government?
     I think I finally understand why everyone is suddenly moving over to blue or charcoal anarchisms now. the concept of a republic based on "god-given rights" was actually so incoherent it wrapped around to justifying abolishing itself. it failed its task with a meteoric success.
618. Q618/Q618 Why do rights require government? -> honorable mention to the line of argument I got out of the chatbot: to defend tiny clusters of bourgeoisie from the formally-powerful clergy that used to exist as well as themselves. yeah, on point.

Plurality and rights

618. Q618/Q618 Rule of law is the same thing as protecting pluralities of political factions; this is to imply that pluralities of political factions are to be preserved no matter how racist they are -> you're making rule of law sound deeply unappealing.
     to be fair though, this definition makes a little more sense than the one where it comes from morality.
618. Q618/Q618 Because Mao did not protect pluralities of political factions, there was not rule of law -> why do you think those factions were hunted down exactly? do you think the government entirely made up its enemies? are you not aware of the concept of Communists having laws and people violating particular Maoist laws?
618. Q618/Q618 that diabolical Hell-conceived principle of persecution / Pride ignorance and Knavery among the Priesthood and Vice and Wickedness among the Laity. [...] That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages among some and to their eternal Infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business (Madison 1774) [8] -> I feel like in a lot of people's minds the history of religious conflict in the United States "neatly" "maps onto" any observed case of Marxist states attempting to centralize either political parties or religions.
     regardless of what the U.S. founders believed you have to admit they created some great prose.
618. Q618/Q618 Without morality, leaders deify themselves and impose their will on the people without restraint -> oh god hang on, hang on. this statement is implying something amazing. so, without ____ (pronounced (blank)), leaders deify themselves and get unlimited power, and when ____ (pronounced (blank)) stops them, they don't have unlimited power. now write "Trotsky" in the blanks. yeah.
     that just turned a really boring statement about the purpose of the U.S. constitution into a weirdly interesting paradox. according to Dennis Prager's terrible interpretation of Trotskyism, no republic actually grants you freedom from corrupt rulers unless it permits you to totally destroy it. so, if you have the ability to totally smash the United States government, you are free. but the purpose of the United States government is supposedly to protect your inherent freedoms that you had before it existed. how can it actually be doing that if you need the right to destroy it in order to truly be free?
     this is probably one of the best combinations to come out of "christian devotional about Ted". christian devotional about Ted + Only morality stops corrupt leaders = Only Ted stops corrupt leaders.
     Ted-given rights! Ted-given rights!!

Secular responses

618. Q618/Q618 The claim that rights come from God is a radical and dangerous notion that only theocratic kingdoms believe (Tim Kaine) [9] [10] -> the author of the article failed to understand that Kaine was being hyper-literal. like, he literally meant laws coming from the supernatural. he was speaking of the kind of reality where you stepped into the fae realm and you forgot you weren't supposed to eat the food and the consequence was they handed you a constitution but now you're bound to theocracy for the rest of your life, and you specifically have to serve the god of another religion that isn't your own that persecutes Christians. would you want that? Xanthagor the god of rot has granted you eternal rights if you agree to be conquered by the plane of decay. do you accept. sometimes it feels like Liberal-republicans are literally not smart enough to follow a Dungeons & Dragons campaign let alone a debate about constitutional rights.
618. Q618/Q618 ... a radical and dangerous notion [11] -> Christian post says he's a Catholic? wow the mormon article was acting like he was the atheist in the room.
618. Q618/Q618

     Voting doesn't create rights

     / Bourgeois representatives cannot create human rights (sense) / (9k) -> rewritten just a bit, we've got another statement for the pile of "Statements that would sound different coming out of Stalin".
618. Q618/Q618 The CPSU was more democratic than God / The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was more democratic than God; according to Bishop Robert Barron, democracy is what happens when you follow the eternal truths written on people's hearts by God and vaguely sketched out in the bible, and all people receive rights before anyone does anything, which is to say that voting is nothing more than a formality to connect government to God and no vote has ever actually decided anything; Benjamin Franklin directly transcribed the word of God into the Declaration of Independence rather than mentioning a Creator due to input from any other founder in the room or any other U.S. person; meanwhile, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a secular and Materialist organization that contained multiple factions each working from their own subjective understandings and expertise to figure out how the party should deviate from previous understandings of eternal Ideals to create better policies, and considered the responses of various regions throughout the country; because the CPSU was not committed to eternal Ideals existing before anyone was born, it had more room for both humans to have individual will and for change ->
     I had to word this carefully to stave off the kind of people who will have a fit because China has a cooperative congress where none of the representatives are pitted against each other, and make it clear I'm only asserting that the Soviet Union had representatives of the people in the flawed sense the U.S. Congress does, not that it was better than that. but fortunately the bar to be better than God is awfully low, so it's not very hard to clear that.

Related

618. Q618/Q618 If rights really come from God then the United States must be praying to at least two countable gods, similar in their countability to Greek or Egyptian religious stories -> tumblr would have had so much fun with this
     this really has a lot of B-side potential. just imagine there actually being named gods of particular things that emerged inside the United States instead of immigrants having to bring in their own religions. the United States revolts. the British crown dismisses them as heretics and says none of them worship the real God. the colonies proceed to come up with new gods. I remember how in real life people actually divided themselves across the 13 colonies according to religion, so there are almost definitely going to be 13 new gods to start out with. would it stay at 13 as more colonies formed on the west edge, or would they already be merging by then? I think there's some argument that there would be a merging of people onto the same god as opposed to putting them together as a pantheon of gods. I think that old pattern from the Christian bible of destroying the other gods would come back because when it comes to religion a lot of people are not very original, they just go back to what they know. I think people would converge from the 13 or so gods back to two. and as for the religious stories... I would totally expect a lot of bible stories to get retold for the 13 new gods in the early days, considering that several bible stories either came from earlier myths or were copied into the quran. but somehow, while I don't know how historically believable it is I do know it's really funny to me to imagine the days each of the early-colony gods died getting written into the stories right after the old stories about them, like, the book doesn't attempt to hide the early versions at all and is just going on and on having events like a questionably plotted manga. there are these breaks in the story coinciding with real historical periods, like around the Civil War. and then after the Civil War the North tries really hard to unify everybody onto one god but fails because the southern states are still praying to the Confederate god.
     I get so lost in alternate-history scenarios. I love them. even if they're about religion. I want to read this crazy new bible that doesn't exist.

Ideologies or fields

618. Q618/Q618 HAS / philosophy