Date: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 20:57:22 -0500
From: Gretchen Niver
Subject: In response to Taylor Kish
I beg to differ when you describe our so-called ‘God-given rights’. There is no god involved, these are human-given. Look at most of history, when there was plenty of god involved in everyday life, but there were no basic individual rights. Royalty and gentry had rights of property, etc., but most lower-born did not. It was only with the advent of Enlightenment thought and philosophy that it was determined that humans had – or should have – basic rights, and that’s only accepted in modern, Western societies, and not so much in other, supposedly ‘Godly’ cultures.
Human societies determine their own ideas of individual rights, and the US Bill of Rights and Constitution are certainly two of the most progressive and enlightened documents ever establishing such. These documents were written by humans for humans, and they have nothing to do with a god of any kind or denomination. The writers of those documents were clear on that.
Governments do not always try to take away rights. Our US Government has helped to ensure more rights for us than any government in history, and only runs into difficulty when trying to protect the rights of minorities against the overwhelming demands of the majority. The inroads of money and influence pouring into our democratic system are only succeeding in diminishing our individual rights, when only a freely-chosen, honest and community-serving legislature can truly keep things in check.
I’m not worried about Government tyranny. I’m worried about the tyranny of those who think their majority beliefs trump the secular society our nations’s founders fought so hard to establish.
Gretchen