Half-Finished Thought

I'm not really tracking well enough today to go into this in any depth, but I found the whole question interesting.

Andrew Sullivan takes off from these comments by Ramesh Ponnuru:

Most of the time, however, when people say that our rights come from God what they are most concerned about affirming is that those rights are not created by human beings. That, it seems to me, is true, or else there are no human rights at all.

Now, this sounds fairly brainless, and I think Sullivan is doing Ponnuru a disservice by selecting this quote. Ponnuru says a bit earlier:

My own view of the matter is that human beings have rights by virtue of the kind of beings that they are, and they would possess these rights even if, so to speak, God did not exist. But I also believe that human beings are the kind of beings we are as a result of the free and creative act of a loving God who chooses to create man in His image and likeness. (I'm leaving aside, as irrelevant, the means He used.) So in that indirect though important sense, our rights are God-given.

which puts the whole argument in a different light.

Sullivan's objection is well within the bounds of traditional liberal thought:

But why could what we understand as human rights not be, in fact, the contingent achievement of a contingent civilization, i.e. the West? And why can these rights not be defended as contingent human achievements that have advanced human dignity and well-being?

That's pretty much the position I suspect an atheist would take. The interesting anomalies start to happen when you look at Ponnuru's statements in the dual contexts of the Founders' philosophy -- they were, remember, overwhelmingly Deists -- and traditional Christian thinking, which comes to us via the Roman Catholic Church and our own contemporary Christianists as a form of the idea that human beings really have no "rights" as such. Anything they get is a courtesy in recognition of their dignity as human beings.

I honestly can't think of a sharper opposition on this question than that between the Founders and, say Pope Benedict. It's also interesting to note that the most important declarations on fundamental human rights came not from churches but from groups that were, in some cases literally, atheistic as much as anything else.

One of Sullivan's readers responds to these arguments:

You speak of human rights as possibly being viewed as "contingent human achievements." But in the world view of fundamentalists there is no such thing as contingent human achievement, no evolution of development - simply a created order that got messed up in the garden, and has not improved much since, and awaits the return of Christ. The only advancements are technological, not moral - for we ever are as we ever were, save for God's dipping his hand in from time to time to help bring things into better focus, and of course sending in his Son.

Sullivan tries to straddle the fence:

I do not believe that human nature is subject to much change, but I do believe that our intelligence and civilization and institutions can harness, restrain and prevent that human nature from doing its worst.

That last comment is revealing, I think, of the great intellectual lack of Christian thinking (or the thinking in any of the Abrahamic creeds, since they derive from the same source): Humanity is intrinsically bad and can live in societies only through the imposition of strict rules of behavior. I find this not only personally repellent, but ludicrously out of touch with our evolutionary heritage: we're social animals. That has been a major thrust of our adaptations over the past few million years, and to think that we somehow are unfit to be social without the imposition of outside authority is ridiculous.

I may come back and tidy this up, but I am slightly under the weather right now -- just enough to make concentration a chore.