(May 15, 2015 at 4:18 pm)SteelCurtain Wrote:(May 15, 2015 at 4:11 pm)Freedom4me Wrote: But are individual rights assigned arbitrarily? If that is how it works, then how and why would the founders of our nation (or any nation) go about deciding on the way to form a "more just" society for all the citizens in the country? There has to be some standard for determining what is more/less just before we can "assign" individual rights. The founders of the U.S. believed that our basic individual rights are intrinsic to our humanity. No one can legitimately deprive us our rights without due process.
No, they are assigned through collective human experience. Don't like having a monarchy decide your religion for you? Let's move somewhere else and take the good things we learned from that government and apply some new ones.
The founders of the U.S. believed that black people were a lesser species, and decided that a black man counted as only 3/5 of a person. What does that say about your idea of 'intrinsic human value?'
The problem isn't in the idea that all human beings have certain inherent rights as human beings, in this case the problem was with those who wanted to oppress and enslave other human beings...merely on the basis of race. If there is no God, how would we have determined that race-based slavery was wrong?