Opposite evils–so far from balancing–aggravate one another

Case in point, the following tweet and rebuttal:

Listen to me carefully:

YOUR RIGHTS DO NOT COME FROM ANY GOD.

YOUR GOD DIDN’T WRITE THE CONSTITUTION. 

The Constitution is an agreement between citizens regarding how government will be run. No more. No less.

YOUR GOD HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH IT. NOTHING.

To declare the Constitution the word of some god fails the smell test immediately. After all, what holy writ contains a clause for amendment and modification? What GOD allows his word to be amended? What god admits up front that he’s fallible and might be wrong and sometime in the future the citizens might have to vote on modifying his law? What holy writ needs to be ratified by member states?

That’s no god, that’s a contract between men.

Rights are not divine. If they came from a GOD, they couldn’t be taken away, limited, modified, or denied to any human being. Yet they are routinely done all of these things. Hell, the Bill of Rights WAS AN AFTERTHOUGHT, created by Amendment after much rancor and debate and legislation. Now, you tell me, what God issues divine law IN DRAFT form?

YOUR RIGHTS DO NOT COME FROM ANY GOD.

Rights are prerogatives WE as citizens grant to each other.

Rights don’t come from any god, they come from US.

Your god has nothing to do with it.

And you don’t get to co-opt our rights, our Constitution, our government, or our country for you lousy shitty selfish homicidal god. Fuck you.

And you can tell your god I said so. – Jim Wright

Wright is wrong.  🙂 (Ah me.  I slay me.)

Real human rights come from God, not the generosity of the state. A human has rights by virtue of the fact that he or she is a human being, made in the image and likeness of God. It is essential to the dignity of the human person to have things like life, liberty, food, water, health care, shelter, etc.  If such things are merely owed to the generosity of the state, then the state that giveth can take away and can starve you to death with impunity because Might makes Right.

But the right to own a gun is not a human right any more than the right to a car or iPod.  These things are civil rights.  Civil rights are granted by the state to the citizen.  God did not hand down a right to a gun on Sinai. Nothing insulting to the essence of human dignity is done if a person does not have a gun any more than if they do not have a cell phone. The elevation of this 18th century human tradition to the status of revelation by saying a gun was granted by God as a consequence of being an American citizen is the very definition of false religion.

See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. (Col 2:8).