2/13/2004 12:05:00 PM|||Andrew|||From Either/Or, by Soren Kierkegaard:

"How unreasonable people are! They never use the freedoms they have but demand those they do not have; they have freedom of thought--they demand freedom of speech."

When I read the great Kierkegaard on this subject, and survey the world around me, particularly the political arena, I cannot help but agree emphatically. Always in the US, people are quick to rush past the freedoms they have been granted through years of blood and sweat, barely noticing them, only to demand ever more and more, a ceaseless deluge of demands for rights and freedoms. How unreasonable indeed!

In fact, I've often wondered about the most famous of lines in American politics: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It quickly emerges, I think, that these so called "unalienable Rights" are not gifted by the Creator at all, but instead this sentence is merely a statement of principle by Men. The only one for which there is any Biblical evidence for is the first:

"Genesis 9:5 For your lifeblood I will surely exact punishment, from every living creature I will exact punishment. From each person I will exact punishment for the life of the individual since the man was his relative.
9:6 'Whoever sheds human blood,
by other humans
must his blood be shed;
for in God’s image
God has made mankind.'"

This is the first law that God establishes, one that he establishes for all the descendants of Noah, hence all people, everywhere. But nowhere is there evidence for the other "rights." By our very aspect of humanity, what grants us the right of liberty? of freedom? And particularly ridiculous sounding to my ear is the third, the right to pursue happiness. It is the foulest nonsense to say that such things are "endowed [to man] by their Creator." This claptrap is merely the musings of men, yet we have built a religion out of it, and even those who follow the true God have ascribed these words of Men to God. |||107670274530410725|||