Do you agree with Richard Dawkins?

[mediamogul]

Natural rights are derived from logic and human/animal nature

That is a bald statement unsupported by proof.

Logic does not infer 'true'. An argument may be logically sound but the inference will only be true if the premise is also true.


'Animal nature' is a vague term. For me,our animal nature means we are driven by survival above all else.That human beings as a specie are innately self interested.

I have no interest in the humbug of a bunch eighteenth century, bourgeois slave owning white men. I also reject the fatuous claim of 'self evident 'rights.


That's all I have to say on the matter.I'm happy to agree to differ.

The one comment I will make is that logic exercised properly can give us truth. Truth in the narrower fallible human sense and not in the exalted absolute religious sense but truth nonetheless. I don't buy into cultural and moral relativism where nothing is true or ethical. Dawkins puts it perfectly :

Philosophers, especially amateurs with a little philosophical
learning, and even more especially those infected with 'cultural
relativism', may raise a tiresome red herring at this point: a
scientist's belief in evidence is itself a matter of fundamentalist faith.
I have dealt with this elsewhere, and will only briefly repeat myself
here. All of us believe in evidence in our own lives, whatever we
may profess with our amateur philosophical hats on. If I am
accused of murder, and prosecuting counsel sternly asks me
whether it is true that I was in Chicago on the night of the crime, I
cannot get away with a philosophical evasion: 'It depends what you
mean by "true".' Nor with an anthropological, relativist plea: 'It is
only in your Western scientific sense of "in" that I was in Chicago.
The Bongolese have a completely different concept of "in", according
to which you are only truly "in" a place if you are an anointed
elder entitled to take snuff from the dried scrotum of a goat.'


That's fine with me. I'm happy to discuss and not one to push my beliefs on others.