You said it yourself, ‘the people retain rights’. Where does it say those rights came from somewhere else?
I make a distinction between what my beliefs are wrt “rights” and what the Founders beliefs were (and, by extension, what the constitution says).
Now, we might claim that the constitution is open to however we choose to interpret it, but I’m not making that claim. I’m just saying that the constitution does not say that the people are the sole source of determining rights. How could it, when it explicitly says that we retain rights that are not listed in the constitution?
Leaving interpretation aside, you don’t know what the Founder’s beliefs were. You have some indications of what they were from their writings, but that doesn’t matter either. What counts is what they wrote in the Consitution.
On the matter of the source of rights, the Constitution does say that people are the source of some rights, and it doesn’t say that there is another source of any rights, or that there isn’t. If you can prove the existence of such a source, that’s just fine. But I’ve never seen evidence of our rights coming from anywhere but the people.
Why would God be a requirement for our inalienable rights? I guess I could understand if Moses brought a tablet of “rights” down from the mountain, but he didn’t. I don’t even think rights are mentioned anywhere in the Bible, for that matter. (Perhaps they’re implied by the general “don’t be a dick” rule, though.)
I agree with the other posters that have said society/social contract. Our rights are nothing more than boundaries that have been placed between people and other people (and government, etc.). Different societies are going to have different boundaries, and thus different rights.
I’m sure our society identifies certain rights that other societies think are completely ridiculous - and vice-versa. Since societies often can’t agree on what even constitutes an individual right, the only thing that makes it inalienable is our own belief this it is inalienable.
Doesn’t this put Rights (capital R ones) in the say level a zoning laws and smoking bans?
Rights are unalienable if they are to be something more that agreements. What other people do is deny you the right to excercise the rights.
Does it mean that Rights are no more special than getting a driver’s license?
It seems to me that Right can come from sources outside of human control if those not-in-the-constitution rights exist. Leaving aside the question of God’s reality or even God’s granting rights, saying that right come from social sources exclusively means that slaves factually did not have the same rights as free people and therefore theur condition wasn’t an offense to humanity.
Gee golly whiz, you had to bring in the blacks. YOU do know it is racism to separate one race from the other by a descriptive title. YOU racist!
Ha ha, and you “all” blame me for being a racist? Ha ha ha ha; ALL you folks are so funny.
You can make me giggle for a half hour.
As to the point, if god does not exist where do our rights come from?—UUUDUAH— let me think about it. I know, man created god so our rights come from man—that took all of 30 seconds to write, and prove— as God only speaks and writes in Kilingon. HA
Don
To understand the idea of Natural Rightrs, one need only look at the DoI. Philosophers like Locke and Paine believed that there were certain “unalienable rights” that derive from Nature and that legitimize the overthrowing of a government when they are violated. Hence, the DoI and the American Revolution.
So, we may try and put down on paper what we think our rights are, but if we (ie, the government) go too far and violate Natural Rights, then the people are justified in taking up armed resistance against the government. Locke thought these rights were Life, Liberty, and Property. These rights supersede the Social Contract.
Me, I don’t buy the whole natural rights thingy, except in as much as we all have some idea in our head of what it would take to rise up against the government. But there is no objective way of determining what those rights are. You pretty much have to be religious to believe that there are some essential rights that exist outside our own ability to agree on what those rights are-- that is, our willingness to either vote on them or give that authority to someone else.
I don’t think you have a strong understanding of what we’re talking about. Why not read the thread again?
I don’t even know who you are. Are you the Austrian Economics fanboy?
I’m charming and clever. I could have you laughing all day. 
I think we agree. But you aren’t communicating very well, so I’m not sure.
True. But I contend that the constitution does not say where rights originate from, so we have to look outside that document to find what the Founders thought.
No, it doesn’t. It says that the people are the source of the Constitution. That’s not the same thing.
The constitution was meant to be a document that restricts what the government can do. It was not supposed to be a list of rights that we have, and it explicitly says that. The Founders were quite clear about that.
You have to get inside the mind of someone pre-Darwin. The Founders couldn’t have conceived of us being just another species of mammal that evolved from other life forms, and that all of that went back to the Big Bang. And that everything we do is simply a social construct. They would have believed in some Prime Mover or some Natural Order of things-- some essential truth that existed apart from our own existence.
It’s irrelevant what the founders thought. It’s only relevant what they wrote in the Constitution, and what they wrote in the Constitution was that rights reside entirely with the people. They can establish them, change them or repeal them as they see fit. “Rights” are, after all, only a legal construction and nothing else.
Another angle at the premise of the op.
Rights, like God(s), are things that are accepted axiomatically. Or more to the point: they are the axioms, the postulates, that secular societies (and societies of diverse religious beliefs) are based on.
Questioning from whence they derive makes as much and as little sense as questioning who created God (or the gods). Assuming you believe they exist, they just are.
In a very general sense, yes.
People want to believe in “capital R Rights”, for much the same reason they want to believe in a deity. It brings a bit of philosophical comfort and design to human minds, that for whatever reason appear “designed” to seek out and create patterns and linkages in the world around us ( at trait that is no doubt highly adaptive from an evolutionary POV ).
But it is all smoke and mirrors. God/s do not exist and neither do unalieanable rights. IMHO :).
ETA: To be clear obviously a “right not to be murdered” is a vastly more powerful cultural icon than the “right to smoke in bars.” But in the end the only difference is in degree, not kind.
Unalienable rights are given to us by God the Creator.
Hypothetically speaking, if there were no God, then there would be no such thing as unalienable rights.
Exactly :p!
Rights aren’t something that are given or granted. If some entity can grant it, it’s not a right, but a privilege. Rights are something that can’t be taken away.
It would not change a thing.
Repealing the Bill of Rights will not make any difference, and will not take away unalienable rights.
Our unalienable rights endowed to us by our Creator, we would still have them whether you repealed a million laws or amended the Constitution every other day from now till the Second Coming.
The Bill of Rights does not “create” any unalienable rights, the Bill of Rights is supposed to “protect” our unalienable rights -which we already naturally had.
For example, the Second Amendment did not “give” Americans the right to keep and bear arms, and it did not give us Americans the right, and the means, of self-defense. Americans had the unalienable right to bear arms, and we had the unalienable right of self defense long before the Second Amendment was invented.
If there WAS a god or gods, they’d be no more “unalienable” due to being decreed by one. On the contrary; if anything having them handed down by a god or anyone else with no justification makes them more arbitrary and baseless, not less. God’s existence is simply irrelevant to the question of rights.
According to who?
It all comes back to people.
And why should we care? “God said so” isn’t a good enough reason to hold a position on anything, including rights. Even if he was real.
Look here your Darwin worshipers.
Human rights came with the evolution of man for about a million plus years. Human Rights are not the problem, nor there definition if you more than a cranberry brain, but humans that suppress rights to one another is a great problem; it all depends on how you want to draw your lines…
You have the right to piss? Oh WELL, not if you are a black or a Muslim. You cannot piss anywhere, so you have to hold it unto your death. Ha ha ha.
If you are white in civilized society you can only piss in designated holes. See what I mean? Rights are not a problem but the suppression of rights is.
OK let’s hang on to this thought and talk about USA land use laws—does a squeal go by human made land use laws? NO, but they are animals, and have rights so they can piss on your food—or YOU eat the squeal for dinner, Unless another human suppresses your rights.
Mohammad (630 AD) had the right to rape Aisha at age nine, as NO one was strong enough to protest, nor to stop it, not even Aisha. NOW USA tort law, USA common law, Western criminal law—(Christian laws from old times and the fathers desire before that), YOU rape a child your life will be trashed if not taken.
You can clearly see rights “are not a problem” but the suppression of rights are.
So how do you draw your lines where one right is suppressed and another is granted—in the Human world?
You cannot determine this until you have an objective in mind on how you want human society to be.
YES— YOU KNOW YES is right. So YOU being a human what are your objectives? Go for it and spell it out as you do not know what your rights are until you have an objective—and if you are a good writer, with good examples the management on this board will do all it can to suppress your rights to talk—ha ha ha.
Don