Rights

This week’s Mustard Seed examines rights. Rights are distinct from privileges. Rights are intrinsic to people simply by virtue of their being. Privileges are granted by one’s community.
The most basic right is the right to life, without which all others are moot. How do we explain such a right?
​     Science can’t explain rights; it can only observe cause and effect. Matter and energy interact through time and space in predictable ways. Darwinian evolution sees life as a random occurrence retained by competition. The strong flourish and the weak perish. Within species and between species the ultimate goal is survival. Community arises merely to facilitate effective competition. Loyalty depends on success. There is no advocate for the weak. Any right to life contradicts Darwin’s theory.
     Rights can only exist where actions are chosen. There must be something beyond the physical, temporal, spatial world that allows the endowed entity to recognize options and select their course. For the right to life to exist there must be something that allows the beholder to recognize the subject as something more than a competitor or fodder.  To justify one’s right to life there must be equality; if not, the superior being is just in subjugating the lesser. A scientific examine will see many more inequalities than equalities. The equality of humans exists, also, outside the physical, temporal, spatial reality of our world.
      That equality, and the subsequent right to life, exists in our creation in the image of God. We must defer to the wisdom and benevolence of our Creator to explain the equality of each human. If we are mere tosses of the cosmic dice we are doomed to tyranny or extinction. If our Creator is not wise our fate is uncertain. If our Creator is malevolent we are puppets for His amusement. If we are not the subjects of a wise and benevolent Creator our equality, hence our whole moral and legal systems, is illusion. 
       Next week:  More on Rights
                                                        God bless.

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