Thoughts on Rights

 “Rights” are a religious concept. A spiritual doctrine. They have no meaning outside of that framework. A godless worldview can’t account for rights. Rights in that case are just whatever the guy in power says they are. There’s no higher power or inherent right to appeal to. So whenever someone talks about rights, they’re making a religious claim. Whether they know it or not. Our nation is founded on this explicitly religious claim — “endowed by the Creator,” etc. That’s why it’s so laughably absurd to hear people defend the “right” to burn the flag or make porn. Really? God endowed us with the mystical right to burn our nation’s flag and have sex on camera? This is a right inherent to our very nature as human beings — the right to desecrate our national symbols and become digital whores? God had that in mind when he made us, did He? It’s silly. But people these days use words without stopping to think about what they mean. Most of the people running around crying about their rights have never once actually considered what a right even is, or how they know they have them, or from where — or whom — these rights come.

Matt Walsh 

 

 "The very idea of rights comes from Christianity: "Richard Rorty was a committed Darwinist; and in the Darwinian struggle for existence, the strong prevail while the weak are left behind. So evolution cannot be the source of universal human rights. Instead, Rorty says, the concept came from “religious claims that human beings are made in the image of God.” He cheerfully admits that borrows the concept of universal rights from Christianity. He even calls himself a “free-loading” atheist: “This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by free-loading atheists like myself.”"

 

Nancy Pearcey quoting Richard Rorty

 

 “the most philosophy can hope to do is to summarize our culturally influenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various situations. The summary is effected by formulating a generalization from which these intuitions can be deduced… That generalization is not supposed to ground our intuitions, but rather to summarize them.” 

“If the activities of those who attempt to achieve this [foundationalist] sort of knowledge seem of little use in actualizing this utopia, that is a reason to think there is no such knowledge. If it seems that most of the work of changing moral intuitions is being done by manipulating our feelings rather than by increasing our knowledge, that is a reason to think there is no knowledge of the sort that philosophers like Plato, Aquinas, and Kant hoped to get.”

“[I]t does little good to point out to the people I have just described that many Muslims and women are good at mathematics or engineering or jurisprudence. Resentful young Nazi toughs were quite aware that many Jews were clever and learned, but this only added to the pleasure they took in beating such Jews. Nor does it do much good to get such people to read Kant and agree that one should not treat rational agents simply as means. For everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being, as a rational agent in the only relevant sense – the sense in which rational agency is synonymous with membership in our moral community.” 

Richard Rorty

"Appeals to reason and knowledge have little effect in Rorty’s thought. We have to concentrate on what works, he says, and his conclusion is that “the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories” 

So, in the mind of an well educated atheist and Naturalist, the very notion of human rights comes down to simple Utilitarianism.   It's all about what works.