The "Cultural Context" Excuse

[Excited Penguin]

I'm surprised how willing some people are to accept a single tyrant accountable to no one.

Yahweh might be given the right by other gods to do whatever he wants with this reality. That doesn't mean humans have given him the same right. Rights are granted, not taken, and can't be granted by one's self. Nor are they inherent, it doesn't even make any sense.

What do you mean rights aren't taken? Of course they are. That's literally how everyone got their rights a couple centuries ago, because of violent revolutions to shake the old system's foundations. You could say Napoleon had a hand in it, but it was such a multifaceted historical event that you can't attribute it to any one person or group of people and you certainly can't say they were granted by anyone in particular. People care for their rights now. You go ahead and try and take some of them away from them for no good reason at all and see how it goes.

I do agree they aren't inherent though, nor are they "self-evident" as some ridiculous notions would have it. Rights are definitely not natural. They are the outcomes of a particular system of living we came up with historically, is all. Rights might change dramatically in nature and scope in the future, even though some presumably will always stay the same, like the most basic ones everyone needs. But that still doesn't make them anything but an enforced human creation, a particular philosophy forcefully shoved down people's throats. And this ties back to what I've said again and again in the past, laws protect our rights and laws, in their turn, are part of an enforced morality of the society focusing on the individual and the lesser group. It is the only form of "objective" morality there is. Inb4, stupid remarks again, that makes it neither the only available morality, nor the only possible one, nor does it make it the best possible one. But it is objective since everyone has to abide by it.