Natural Rights Rest Upon
DEISM
by Bryan Black
Rights lie at the center of today's moral
confusion. On the one side, the doctrine of higher rights belongs
to the supernaturalists, who tie the doctrine of intrinsic human
significance and definite moral standards to obscure, arbitrary and often
repulsive teachings revealed in holy books from another world and
time. On the other hand, modern notions of rights capable of
engaging current sentiments and issues prove all too flexible and open to
manipulation. They lie under suspicion of a false progress that throws
the baby out with the bath water.
This confusion of opposite approaches to rights takes us back to the
origins of the Republic. The same divisions afflicting us today
prevailed in the moral universe then. Solutions then, though
clearly available to us today, still must be claimed to become effective.
In this way, the present generations find themselves forced to
chose. Either they regain our original understanding of rights that
puts America back on course, or they refuse moral enlightenment in favor
of attachment to the usual prejudices.
To clarify the moral fundamentals requires only a consistent
understanding of the attributes of various types of rights, that pays
close attention to distinguishing their several classes and kinds.
But this task of a consistent analysis fails to engage the decisive
mobilizations of the day, where partisan allegiances and established
moral hatreds have already done their work of splitting natural humanity
into camps of mutual enemies. If we would inherit the original
analysis of rights, we must start from the original recognition of a
divided humanity, which gave that analysis application, urgency, power
and authority.
The universal naturalism of the Founders opposed itself to both the
supernaturalists and the non-believers. Faced with the usual
question of belief, whether they believed in God or not, the Founders
replied ‘a plague on both your houses.' To understand the doctrine
of natural rights of the Declaration and of the Bill of Rights, we must
admit resurgence of this long-standing opposition between believers and
non-believers, which our Founders dismissed as morally
unacceptable. In one camp individuals look to Jesus Christ and
Almighty God first for their own immortality, next for their innermost
hopes for their children, family and friends, and thus by a
straightforward extension trust the future of their nation to the same
Biblical god. In the other camp individuals look not to God but to
the human power where the good society provides these same things,
touching their hopes for themselves, for their children, for their family
and friends and hence likewise for the future of their nation.
The individuals in each camp, just because we have here to do with the
same things really at stake naturally and universally in the lives of all
human beings, must first be acknowledged as entirely sincere. But,
because they do not rise to the enlightened standpoint of universal
naturalism, the first act of these individuals accuses the members of the
other camp of insincerity. In this way now as in 1750, believers
and unbelievers condemn themselves to wars of moral unreflection, both
sides prosecuting the same design of darkness – the stratagem of
counter-Enlightenment.
To the contrary, we must begin from a universal position that
acknowledges the natural concern of all humanity for their own
well-being, for the well-being of their children, for their families,
their friends and the future of their nation and, hopefully, their
planet. There the line must be drawn. Those who will not attest
these natural, universal concerns of human individuals, who begin by
excluding some faction on whatever grounds of belief or unbelief, bring
hatred with them to the table. Upon that foundation neither moral
discussion nor republic can stand. These members of an already divided
house, we insist, qualify in point of moral sincerity. We do not doubt
their sincerity for a moment. But their dogmatism precedes them and makes
them dangerous to enlightened association, whether afflicted by the
dogmatism of belief or unbelief.
The standpoint of morality reached in this way declares the natural piety
of Deism. We acknowledge a humanity of natural interests and concerns
made universally the same by "Nature's God", prior to all
distinctions of belief and unbelief. This God of our Founding
Fathers differs profoundly from God the Father. The God of Jesus,
of the Bible generally and hence of Christians, Jews and Moslems, is not
"Nature's God", but is a supernatural god. We see at once
that Nature's God establishes universal, natural rights. But the
biblical god establishes only supernatural rights. Supernatural
rights are not universal, but privilege the supernaturalist sect of the
believer.
Dogmatic opponents of a supernatural god uphold atheism or
agnosticism. From eagerness to sever from supernatural divinity
these unbelievers deny Nature's God unthinkingly. In consequence, they
refer our rights to human power, declaring not natural rights but human
rights. This dogma of human rights already replicates the supernaturalist
record of shameful sects and sordid schisms by breeding its own plethora
of secular divisions and confusions.
Human rights refer to human and not divine power. When we analyze
human rights in light of this contrast, however, enemies of the
government have no more standing than enemies of god the Father. Rights
along this line of interpretation, however, lose significance. Everybody
already has all their human rights just by virtue of being human. Some
won slaves and others suffer slavery, but that's just a matter of power
and not a violation of the rights of the powerless. Atheists faced with
this problem usually drop the analysis of rights. They assert
specific rights on an ad hoc basis. They support equality, and
claim slavery violates that right, whatever the basis of equality or any
other right may be.
In the name of equality, however, we pass from slavery to sexism, to
ageism, next to the equality of five year olds to make their own
decisions, to recognize whomsoever they chose for parents, and finally to
recognize no parents at all. Comes next the line between human and
animal. What rights have humans that animals have not?
Suddenly it's a sin to kill the fleas on your dog, and the wisdom of
children neglects to remove head lice that feed upon their neglect.
To the contrary, the power of natural rights cannot be reduced to human
power. The natural rights struggles against slavery in the last
century and against Jim Crow in this century concerned themselves with
human power as struggles for civil rights. This distinction of natural
from civil rights reduces the human power to that of civil government. In
this way, we hold the civil authorities to universal moral standards of
universal, natural rights. Civil government otherwise deserves rebuke as
unnatural and so far perverse, immoral and unworthy of our
cooperation, according to our best traditions of revolution and
reform.
Regarding the animals, these involve no new kinds of rights but are a
different class of rights holders. We see how animals easily come by
civil rights. Civil governments have laws on the books extending such
rights by criminalizing cruelty to animals, criminalizing the taking of
wild animals deemed endangered, etc. But the notion that animals
have natural rights makes no such sense. Natural rights belong to moral
discourse and association. Animals made by the same Creator who made us,
have no entry upon moral discourse. They have not gone so far to
entertain moral positions dogmatically, nor yet wasted the substance of
their lives in thrall to moral blindness, whether of supernaturalist or
atheist and agnostic varieties. We make nonsense of the natural facts of
life, repudiate all moral sincerity and, in this, set new records for
moral benightedness by extending natural rights to animals.
This preliminary analysis of rights only makes more urgent the prior
question of faith. We have roughed out just the main distinctions
of natural from supernatural and human rights, of natural from civil
rights and of natural from animal rights. But this analysis, by
recovering the suppressed moral memory of Deism, already carries us far
beyond the contemporary moral condition. The prior question of faith in
this way provides evidence of itself as the actual condition necessary to
any progress. The dogmatic faiths of supernatural believers and of
humanists unbelievers begin by abolishing the common ground of moral
sincerity. Deism begins with this sincerity of all as a natural,
universal attribute attesting our Maker's handiwork. Without this return
to our inclusive faith that disarms at the outset the enmity now
habitually brought to issues of rights, we have abandoned the God of our
Fathers. We have alienated our rights to anything better than the
European degeneration of nations driven by nationalisms, ideologies and
religions.
Cicero
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