The Rights of Atheists

Today, on the radio, I heard a Christian say, “When an atheist claims he has certain rights, he is absconding the argument of the Christian, because rights can only come from God. Without God, no one has any rights.”

I understand where this person is coming from. He knows that if humans attempted to provide rights to their fellow humans, they would fall short. He wants there to be an absolute set of inviolable rights that apply to all of humankind. But here’s the problem. Suppose such a list of rights dictated by God actually exists. How do we humans determine what they are? After all, God did not carve them into the face of the Earth for all to see. So, how do we discover them? A Christian would say, “God has given them to us in the Bible.” But a Muslim would say, “God has written them in the Koran.” People of other religions would have equally diverse responses. Who gets to decide for everyone else what the true set of rights are?

As you can see, it is problematic discovering the true God-given rights of man when we can’t even agree who the true God is. In addition, people who believe in the same God can’t agree on what their God’s list of rights consists of. Further, even if two people agree on a right, they may not agree on how to implement that right in the real world.

Look at the US Constitution. Even though our Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, our founders found it necessary to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Why was that necessary if we already had unalienable rights? Well, I believe it was because they knew there would be disagreement over what those unalienable rights were and thus needed to be defined in some way in our founding document so there would be less confusion.

Another issue is that of enforcement. If humans have rights, then it seems reasonable for there to be some sort of punishment for those that violate those rights. We humans recognize that without those punishments, we essentially don’t have any rights, for evil men could run roughshod over good men without retribution. We can state all we want that we have rights, but that will not stop a bad guy with a fist, or a knife, or a gun.

It’s this enforcement issue that makes me question whether our rights come from God. As we all know, God does not find it necessary to exact justice on those that violate others rights. But without that side of the rights coin, the other side fails. Rights mean nothing if a violator of them sees no retribution. It’s like a blind man being told that his eyes are reacting to light just fine. It does him no good if the optic nerve is damaged.

So, why would God give us rights, then do nothing to protect them? Perhaps he just wants to see us flounder about figuring it all out ourselves. The problem is that men are not omniscient. Even with the best intentions, we fail. We sometimes convict people of crimes they did not commit. We sometimes set free the worst among us. Just think of how much better it would be if God—assuming he is a good God—made the decisions about who should be punished and who should not. And I’m not talking about punishment in the next life. That does no good for all the subsequent victims of crimes after the initial one. In fact, if indeed God is omniscient, he could actually prevent all crimes before they are committed. How cool would that be? Kind of like those officers in the movie “Minority Report,” but with a perfect knowledge of the future rather than a murky one.

It seems to me that even if God does have a list of rights that all humans possess, he has left it to us to figure them out for ourselves. We must decide what those rights are, write them down for all to see, get a general agreement on their correctness, and then enforce them by punishing those who violate them. But as we can see by looking at the world around us, there is no agreement across the globe on what rights we have. That is one reason we are divided up into countries with differing sets of laws that define differing sets of rights for its citizens. Also, some countries like the USA are further divided into states, counties, and cities that each define our rights. It seems that’s the best we can do in the absence of God doing it for us.

First Contact – Part 27 – Good and Evil

Growing up I was fortunate to have had a loving father and mother. As a very young child I was sheltered from the complexities of the world. Therefore, my first exposure to Evil was when watching television. One of Mom’s, Dad’s, and my favorite TV shows was “The Rifleman”. This was about a single rifle-slinging dad (Chuck Conners as Lucas McCain) raising his son (Johnny Crawford as Mark McCain) while ranching in New Mexico during the latter half of the 19^th century. Watching “The Rifleman” was a special family occasion each week. Mom would pop popcorn beforehand, and we would eat it while engaged in the show. Sometimes after finishing my popcorn, I would sit on the floor and let my mom or dad comb my hair. This always felt really good for some reason. I can’t enjoy anyone doing this to me anymore because a comb doesn’t work well on a bald head.

In the show, Lucas was presented as having a high moral code and always exhibiting it to his son Mark. Most episodes involved an entanglement with shady characters if not downright outlaw vermin. There was one particular episode where the bad guys were really getting the upper hand on Lucas. I went ballistic, blessing out (in mild child language) the bad guys and wishing for Lucas to turn the tables on them. My mom and dad had to calm me down and remind me that what I was seeing wasn’t really happening; it was simply a staged TV show. I already knew that, of course, but the acting was so convincing I forgot it temporarily.

What was interesting about my interaction with “The Rifleman” was that I just intuitively knew that what the outlaws were doing was wrong and in need of correcting. I don’t think my parents told me I should be filled with righteous indignation over what they were doing. I just knew it. But of course “The Rifleman” was a work of fiction, and the authors could write the script in such a way as to clearly delineate the good guys from the bad.

Finding out that there were bad people in the world willing to bring harm to others for their own personal gain was devastating to me. I just couldn’t understand how anyone could bring themselves to harm others. It just simply didn’t make sense to me. But then I grew up.

As I have aged I have come to understand more about Good and Evil. And what I have come to understand is that oftentimes it is very difficult to distinguish between the two. This is because what is Good and what is Evil is totally dependent on each person’s individual viewpoint. Let me give you an example.

Back in the 1700’s, the American colonies were under the reign of the King of England. However, given the distance and the fact that the colonies were being taxed without having proper representation in Parliament, a number of colonists started pushing for independence. As tensions escalated on both sides, the situation eventually led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the fighting of the Revolutionary War. A lot of killing took place by both sides. Who was Good and who was Evil? Today we Americans tend to think of the revolutionaries as the Good and Righteous ones as they were fighting for their God given unalienable rights that the Brits were denying them. But the Brits believed that the King had the God given authority to rule his kingdom, and anyone who defied this authority was opposing God himself.

A similar thing can be seen in the modern day Arab / Israeli conflict, which now involves many different countries. The blame game can go very deep with one side saying they did so-and-so because the other side did thus-and-such. Then the other side blames their actions on previous actions of the former side. The blame continues to go further into the past until time blurs the lines between Good and Evil. Many years ago I read a book by President Jimmy Carter entitled “The Blood of Abraham”. I don’t remember much of what he said, but I do remember that he clearly showed how difficult the issue is given the extensive history of conflict. It kind of reminds me of the episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” entitled “A Feud is a Feud”. In this show, Andy comes up against two families that have been feuding for so long they couldn’t even remember what started the whole thing. Sometimes it seems that we just have to put the past in the past and negotiate a peace without regard to who did what in the past. I know this is easier said than done, but if both sides want peace it needs to happen. If only we had the equivalent of an Andy Taylor that could resolve the age old conflict as easily as he did in the TV show.

However, sometimes one or both sides don’t want peace. That’s the rub. This can especially be true if one or both sides believe that their opposition to their enemies is God ordained. There are apparently many people in the world that think that the God they believe in is inherently Good, regardless of what he does. This means that anything they believe God is telling them to do is also Good, regardless of how heinous it appears to outsiders. You see this in the Old Testament. God supposedly told Moses to lead his people into nations unprovoked and kill everyone, including the women and children and animals. These actions would be considered Evil if a nation did them of their own accord. Yet somehow if we are convinced that God was behind the actions, they suddenly become Good. The problem with this attitude is that it leaves Good people open to becoming Evil should a tyrant or dictator be able to convince them that the reprobate orders he is giving them are authorized by God himself.

I have been watching some documentaries about Adolf Hitler and his rise to power and his decline to destruction. It is said that Hitler believed his actions to be approved by God. After watching these documentaries I can certainly see why. Hitler was nearly killed by a mustard gas attack in World War I. Hitler was confronted by an Englishman who had him in his rifle sights, but didn’t feel right about killing a wounded unarmed enemy, so let him go. Upon becoming dictator, his own countrymen attempted to assassinate him several times, but fate didn’t allow it. I can easily see how he could come to think of himself as being invincible and protected by God, thus adding fuel to his mission. Yet the world now almost universally views Hitler as being the epitome of Evil. He’s the go-to person to compare someone else to when we want to decimate that person’s character. Yet, if indeed Hitler was taking his marching orders from God, he was really a Good and Righteous person. So, if everything God does is Good, the question becomes, “How do we know when a person is acting according to God’s will?” We certainly don’t want to cut short a God-ordained killing spree and thus find ourselves opposing God, would we?

I contend that any given action in a given situation is either Good or Evil or neutral or somewhere in between regardless of who perpetrates it, even God. If that is not true, then how can we with any certainty be able to condemn a person who performs a heinous act and then claims that he was only following the will of God?

Some people are very good at obfuscation. They can say one thing while secretly doing another. Hitler and his propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, were extremely good at this, presenting an appealing image of the future Fuehrer while planning something more sinister. Many of the politicians in the US are good at obfuscation also. They speak one way to one group and another way to another group, then perhaps do neither when it’s time to vote. Can you tell I am cynical?

So, how does one properly determine what Good and Evil are? Who decides? What is appropriate for our government to do about it? To my way of thinking, the only thing the government should have the power to do is prevent or punish Evil, not force us to do Good. So, what is Evil? This is a difficult question since it is highly dependent on circumstances, but I can answer generally. Basically, Evil should be considered to be using unprovoked force against other people. Everyone should be free to live their own lives without interference from others except in the case where that person wants to use his freedom to limit yours. In other words, your freedom to move your fist ends at my face. Obviously, there are more than 50 shades of grey when it comes to this general rule, but that is why we have courts. Facts are gathered and a reasoned conclusion should be reached about a person’s guilt or innocence.

Hey, it’s not a perfect system, but neither are we perfect people.