Is it? I am not convinced. As a matter of inherency to human flesh, perhaps... Or not. As a matter of human spirit, for lack of a better word, less certain of refutability. As a question of human relations, I am doubtful of refutability. I'm still trapped in NJ, typing on a phone... My notion of damnation's torment. We should have this discussion because it is important to see why such rights as matters of relations between men do in fact exist as fundamental elements of those relationships, arising negatively out of the innate equality of authority, man to man. Don't think I can do on this phone, as I am considering suicide because of even this tiny bit of typing. I believe I now know why millennials are typically so bottomlessly stoopid: anyone with intelligence worth the mention would self-destruct within minutes of taking up a cell phone for net.purposes. This is impossibly painful.Originally Posted by fisharmor
Maybe. Let us discuss this further when I can find a device.It's totally refutable
I can refute it on the same basis that I refute Sola Scriptura: it was never man's understanding until a few people pushed the idea and it caught on.
This is a VERY weak attack. By analogy, we might say that gravity did not exist prior to men possessing the concept of gravity.
Many people once believed the world was flat. Did belief or other falsity of knowledge make the world flat in this sense? No.
Discovery does NOT equate with invention.In the case of Sola Scriptura, it's an idea that mankind pulled out of thin air after 1500 years of relevant recorded history: in the case of natural rights, it's similarly pulled out of thin air, but after... all of recorded history across all continents, up to the 17th century.
Men did NOT, for example, invent the relationships that lead to the formulation of Euclidean theorems of geometry. Those relationships existed perhaps since the purported big bang. They discovered them and subsequently theorized about them, eventually proving them in accord with the formal system we call logic.
See clarification, above.How can we say men have natural rights, when men didn't even have a concept for them for about five millennia?
Dööd, Iám surprised at you... this sounds as if you feel defeated. Do not choose defeat. So long as you refuse that choice, you cannot be defeated, even if your adversary kills or chains you. Defeat rests nowhere but in the mind.Mind you this is mainly playing Devil's Advocate... but the natural rights concept is a large plot point in the same fairy tale that includes the DoI, the Constitution, and the United States, and I stopped believing in that fantasy a long time ago.
The relevant demonstration of rights rests in the nature of men's relationships to one another. The solo man is God and may do as he wishes because there is nobody to thwart him.
Therefore, the context of his relation to his fellows is what counts on this matter of "rights".
To begin, I offer you what I have come to call the "Cardinal Postulate", which says
All men are equally endowed with life
Do you accept this assertion as truth? Life is fact. Questions of whence it issues as such are irrelevant to the fact and to the discussion at hand.
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