Human Rights and God

 God is dead.  God remains dead and we have killed him.”  So wrote the German philosopher, Nietzsche.

If the Western world no longer takes the God of the Bible seriously then why should they take the morality that He imposed upon them seriously as well?  Although Nietzsche died in 1900 his basic philosophy is the meat that is chewed and digested by agnostics.  Unfortunately this very concept is also pervasive in our society today.  For Nietzsche, any bond that mankind had to an eternal being was nothing but an illusion.  The only truth was that there was no truth.  There were no boundaries that would prevent mankind from interpreting truth as he perceived it to be. 

However (supposedly) liberating this freedom was to be, it does leave humans, who are essentially moral beings, in a bit of a pickle, especially when it comes to the question of universal human rights.  In this progressive society of ours, in a world in which God is dead, where does one get the idea of human rights, much less universal human rights?

Once we deny the idea of God, what happens to the morality traditionally associated with Him?   Then morality must vanish well as this God who created it. 

All of which leads, then, to a new question. If this old morality is discarded, where do we get a new one?  The answer is obvious.  We have to create it ourselves!! Morality this way becomes something physical, not spiritual.  It depends on man’s own thinking and not from a Supreme Being we call God (since He died!). We can get our values from among ourselves. Our “truths” therefore come from human passion, flesh, and needs at the moment and not by some omnipresence in the sky. 

But if human rights are now what we as humans alone create…….then how do we do it? And if someone gives us these rights, what can stop them from taking these same rights away?  And whose definition of truth is the correct one?

When Thomas Jefferson penned the opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence in his preamble to our Constitution, he wrote that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”……etc. This man was a Deist in his religious beliefs; nevertheless he understood that only with a Creator could these rights be secure.  The mere fact that these are “rights” as opposed to “privileges” is misunderstood today.

These rights have to come from a “Source” higher than we humans. This alone makes them inalienable….otherwise our rights are derived from humanity, from human needs, from human desire alone.   They would be fluctuating and depending on the situation at the moment and are not permanent.

 Maybe that’s good.  Perhaps human rights should change along with desires and needs.  If so then, nothing is absolute, nothing is certain, including universal human rights.  The history of humanity is filled with duly enacted laws that have trampled upon the most basic human rights. 

However, lofty the intellectual appeal of post modernism, no one lives it, neither in the personal realm nor in the public one.  No matter how liberal, open minded, secular, tolerant and progressive, people and societies sooner or later run into situations that reflect moral absolutes….absolutes that demand a God who imposed both moral absolutes and basic human rights for His creation.

            That’s us folks!!!