Philosophical Thought Experiment For The Evening

Work with me on this one. Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution recognize that humans are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...etc.

The purpose of the Bill of Rights (1st 10 Amendments of the Constitution, for those of you who slept through government and political science) is to codify some of the universally recognized human rights. Freedom of speech, of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.

Here's where it gets interesting. These rights are not given to us by government. It's just the opposite. The Bill of Rights tells us exactly what the government CANNOT take away from us. In other words, there are concepts greater than the government. There are things that no human should ever have taken away from them. Yet in other words, the Bill of Rights is not a statement that the benevolent government is giving us these rights, and we should be grateful for its graciousness. Instead, this is telling the government that IT CANNOT TAKE THESE BASIC FREEDOMS AWAY FROM US. (Have I made this point yet?)

The Bill of Rights, along with the Declaration of Independence, are codifications of our Founders' belief there is something greater than government out there. There is something higher at work that says that we all have the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and Uncle Sam can't take it away from us.

The problem that we see nowadays (in my humble opinion) is the refusal to recognize there is something greater than government. I think liberals see government as a cure-all. Give it enough money and power, and it will fix all our problems and woes. In effect, liberals make government their higher power.

Basic human rights are recognized only when it is apparent there is something greater than government at work. There is something in the universe that cries out when a slave is beaten, a communist regime takes away all private ownership of property, a religious fanatic slams a plane into a skyscraper, or when a woman is slapped by her husband. There doesn't have to be a law against any of these things. It's just wrong on some fundamental level. We may not be able to explain it, but we feel an unsettling in the pit of our stomachs when faced with it. Something in our inner fiber recognizes there is injustice, and something tells us that this is not the way it's supposed to be.

If we suppress this innate justice detector and replace it with man-made laws, we are in trouble. Man's laws change all the time, in accordance with social pressure and the mores of society as it exists when the laws are written. The pure genius of our Founding Fathers is the recognition that unless they specifically said what the government couldn't do; sooner or later somebody would think the government should do it all.

Call it what you will. There's something in the Universe that generates these feelings, and these rights. Liberals have no humility, I think. They don't seem to realize it's the people who empower the government, not the government empowering the people. A good government recognizes that as good as it might be, its moral authority comes from something beyond what laws are on the books. If it does not conduct itself in accordance with this universal standard of right and wrong, then it's not a just government at all. It has no moral authority, because it doesn't recognize anything beyond itself. It's not accountable to anything other than what laws it creates.

So ponder that one awhile. The government doesn't GIVE us anything, especially not our basic human rights.