That Hideous Sense; Part I

Many of the fundamental arguments of the atheist camp in this present day and age revolve around a fundamental, and horrific, sense of entitlement. By entitlement, I refer to that obvious and obsessive belief of the human being that things are due to him, whether they be life, liberty and property, happiness, success, peace, health, or anything else. Examples of the most common arguments regarding this sense of entitlement are arguments concerning 1) God healing amputees, 2) the Bible condoning slavery, 3) genocide in the Old Testament, and of course, 4) The Problem of Evil, or "why Bad things happen to Good people."

To treat the subject of entitlement, it will first be necessary to analyze and examine the origins of this, the most selfish of human traits. Certainly this sense that we are entitled to certain things simply by virtue of having been born is not NEW in human history and society. Humans have always been selfish, it is no great leap of the mind nor mystical expression to know this to be true. But our modern entitlement is a very special kind of entitlement. It is the entitlement of the Enlightenment. It is the entitlement of "rights." It is the idea, miraculously arrived at, that all humanity is equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights and liberties, such as the right to live and the right to be free. This beautiful expression of pious platitude was first and best expressed, perhaps, by the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. Those gentlemen of 18th Century America, who grew and were influenced by the brilliant political minds and thinkers of libertarian ideology in Europe at the time, most especially Mr. John Locke, were the first and most eloquent in expressing this notion that humans are entitled to certain legal protections, that they have a "right" to life or liberty or property. Thus, to treat with entitlement, first we shall have to treat with rights, before we can ever address the arguments of atheism which have grown out of them.

Rights. A more powerful political idea has never been espoused, in my sober opinion, than that of "rights." The idea that we are automatically endowed with "rights" from the moment of our birth is extraordinarily appealing to human kind. Unsurprising, really, given our history of selfishness. Leaving aside the antiquated and nonsensical idea that our rights are only conferred through some magical and mystical natal ceremony when we completely exit our mother's body, and never before hand despite our existence as unique, individual humans, let us consider the idea of rights, as well as the practice.

Why do rights exist? Rights, in purely political speech, are not liberties from the Government, they are privileges granted by the government. The right to vote, for example, is a privilege bestowed upon certain American citizens by the government. It is historically undeniable that the current people allowed to vote were not able to vote at the founding of this nation. Thus there is certainly nothing "inalienable" about this kind of right. So what we must really be looking for, at least first, are not strictly "rights" but in fact liberties. Liberties are those things which are enshrined properties, hopefully protected from government interference in, and considered to be entitled to citizens of the United States. Those Liberties are mainly expressed in the mis-named Bill of Rights. First we must note that there is absolutely no espousing of rights to life, liberty or property. Second, we must note that whatever liberties we examine, when we deal with them in that purely political sense in which they were created, we deal with them as they are noted and granted, or protected from, a certain governmentary body. The first problem that we must recognize with rights, is that they are not universal. Rights exist within the society or government that enshrines and establishes them. The rights allegedly possessed by a citizen of the United States do not apply to a citizen of Darfur or Pakistan. Next, if we are to be honest in our historical studies, we must note that while the Declaration of Independence alleges that humans have "inalienable" rights, we must note two things. The first is that those rights are allegedly granted to humans by their Creator. The second is that history shows us that the concept of truly "inalienable" rights is an absurdity, and one hypocritically preached, for instance, by the honored representatives of Virginia, South and North Carolina, and Georgia. Yes indeed, all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, such as the rights to life, liberty and pursuit of property, unless of course one happens to have a black or brown skin tone and live in the Southern United States between the 16th and 19th centuries. Inalienable? Not even in the practices of those who first made the claim, let alone in the history of man.

So we have two major problems, and one major contradiction, for the atheist position in this regard. Rights are things that are directly related to government, whether as privileges or as protections. They are not universal. Likewise, rights are obviously not inalienable in practical terms, as the number of times our supposed "rights" have been alienated from us is astoundingly high, even in the United States. Taken together we must realize the following: That a right, if it is NOT inalienable, cannot actually be anything other than a privilege granted by the government. Even our most precious civil liberties, those things which are supposed to be protected from the encroachment of the power of government are violable. That is to say that it is still only the whim of the government, and its own choice to adhere to the paper protection of our Constitution that allows us to keep those rights. There have been many times in history when the United States government has alienated those liberties from us, for example, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early 1800s. In the end, civil liberties only practically amount to privileges that that the State is only less likely to infringe upon, and they are certainly still granted to the people. Ironically, this is quite obvious, in an examination of the very nature of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was a statement from the United States Government, written and adopted two years AFTER the Constitution was adopted and the United States was formed, stating that the United States government would not do the following things. This is still a granting of privileges though, and the US government has shown itself willing and able to violate the pleasant platitudes of our Constitution.

This then is the inevitable conclusion of what "rights" truly are. They are nothing more than lip services to an ideal, as well as a false and flimsy shield erected by governments (and only a bare few at that), to give their citizens a sense of calm and relief from fear of government power. They are the lies that have been propagated against humanity since their creation, the lie that makes people lazy, indolent, and selfish. They are the lies that have become a greater tool for political control and power than any other political ideology in history. They have triumphed over all other contenders, not monarchy, nor communism, nor fascism, nor any other political scheme or idea has ever withstood them for long. And because they are a lie, because there is obviously no substance or truth to their claims, as we have just seen, all arguments based upon them by the atheist camp are likewise false. No challenge to God based on a sense of rights or entitlement can ever succeed, for it is an argument based on the absurdly false premise that we have rights, or that we are entitled. We are not. We bought our rights with blood and bullets, and we have traded them in the present for "security."

But I digress. I mentioned one major contradiction for this position as well. And it is one of the most amusing and ironic contradictions that I have yet observed in the atheist position. This contradiction is at the source of the only possible solution to the problems of "rights" that an atheist can attempt.

You see, the earliest Libertarian thinkers were not atheistic at all. Likewise, the Founding Fathers, to whom we Americans at least, owe a great deal of our political consciousness, were not, by and large atheists. They were certainly not all Christians, or even strictly theists, but nearly all of them believed in a higher power, whether it be the Christian God, the God of Deism, or some God in between. This is precisely how we came to have the interesting passage, earlier noted, in the Declaration of Independence which notes that it is "by their Creator" that all men have been made equal and granted certain inalienable rights. By their Creator. Creator? Creator of Man? The Creator, regardless of your perspective regarding the nature of God, is always God. We do not go around calling anything else (and those gentlemen of the 18th Century certainly didn't then either) "Creator." The Creator is God, of one sort or another. And the concept of inalienable rights that are shared by all humanity are indelibly tied to that Creator in early libertarian thinking, and in the establishment of the United States. And of course it is. It is the most sensible thing we have yet encountered in our treatment of rights, to note that these political philosophers and government builders acknowledged that it is from God that those rights come.

Why? Why is it purely common sense for them to conclude as such? Because of the very same solution to the problems of rights that I noted before, and will now explain in depth. I have noted the fallacies of "rights," I have examined and even thoroughly abused them. But nothing I have said here is strictly new. I am not the first person to realize this, nor the last, and one must remember that the men who first espoused, propounded and made practical use of these ideas were not unintelligent. I myself rather suspect that they saw the exact same problems as I have, and they solved them exactly as I would.

If rights must be granted by some governing authority, and we desire to make them universal and hope that they are truly "inalienable" then there is only one authority to whom we have logical recourse. For there is only one source of objective authority in the world, and that objective source of authority is God. Likewise, there is only one way to explain the merely magical or mystical means by which we humans are presumed to acquire such rights! That means is God. Only God can be considered truly authoritative over the whole of humanity, for we certainly do not have, have never had, and likely will never have, a true government of the entire world. Moreover, even were we to have a world government, those "rights" would remain the idealistic and poetic prose that we noted before. They are like a thin sheet of tissue paper attempting to stop a bullet, for if there is one world government, who precisely is to stop that government from doing as it wills? The problem of rights is not solved so easily as that! To truly remedy it, we need God. We cannot have rights without God. Rights as we want them, as we need them, to exist can only be granted by the Divine, and if they are granted by the Divine, simply by virtue of us being human, then two things become very clear. First is that these things, if we have them at all, are gifts. We do not earn them, we do not work for them, we cannot be entitled to them, for God does not have to give them. God chooses to, for God's reasons, and who is to say that God cannot choose to take them away, or never bestow them in the first place?

Herein lies the difference between the Christian concept of rights, and the secular concept of rights. The Christian can speak of, and even use, rights with far less hypocrisy, for the Christian can believe that his rights, and the rights of others, are not "rights" at all, but are instead the gifts of God, which we are not to abuse. To the Christian, the "right to life" is not the idea that a human is entitled to life, but the idea that a human has been given the tremendous gift of life by God, and that the rest of us would be doing evil in stripping them of that gift. In other words, the "rights" of the Christian, are the rights to not do something. We as Christians have no right to murder. We have no right to covet or possess. We have no right to anything, which is the most precise and perfected form of rights imaginable. Instead of a right to speak freely, we have only the right to not speak at all in consideration of others, a right that one might wish the whole world would remember when vitriol and hate are all we seem to hear. Everything that we have, all good and all justice and all mercy and all love, all of it is a gift. And none of us have the right to attack, strip away, assault, or otherwise malign those gifts. Of course, the second thing to become clear is that rights are not dependent upon "birth," nor status in life, etc. If we have rights and are to speak honestly of them, they apply to all humans. Any being that meets that basic criteria possesses these "rights," and thus we have resolved that which we left aside at the beginning of this piece.

The secularist, meanwhile, apparently believes precisely the opposite of the Christian. In far too many cases, he enshrines his entitlement without examination of its nature and origins, and likewise without conscious realization of its implications. His rights are dependent upon a God whom he rejects, or upon the final and fallacious claim that because we possess a body, we are entitled to it, when possession never inherently demonstrates entitlement or ownership. He claims that humans have universal rights, that we are entitled, without ever truly grasping how it could possibly be that we have "universal" rights. And then, worse and worse, our secularist friend will take his sense of entitlement, and use it to assault God. And it is this that brings us to the heart of this essay, for now we have reached the problems I enumerated before, and which are often dropped upon the poor, unsuspecting Christian by the atheist with an axe to grind, and too much Dawkins literature littering his mind. And so, we must deal with them in turn, the children of entitlement, and some of the supposedly greatest arguments against God and Christianity there are.