Everywhere around us it appears the ties that bind us together as Americans are unraveling. The value of freedom that formed us as a people and provided us with unity of purpose, and consequentially allowed for civil and sensible national discourse, has been utterly severed. We now discuss to what extent we must enslave our fellow man to our most capricious of desires; and we plot to what degree we will ruin the nation through unchecked debt born of disregard for consequence.
What is lacking in our Constitutional republic is any sound notion of rights; due to the self-serving immediacy of our capacious desires and through our utter confounding of democracy and freedom we have sacrificed our children on the altar of expediency. By majority rule we have selected our oppressors, who heave our wealth into the ever-gaping chasm of want and idleness; and meanwhile, our politicians with earnest displays of self-aggrandizing pomposity claim credit for siphoning off our sweat and tears and blood in which to baptize their party faithful.
With mock sobriety and solemn buffoonery, our alleged field generals in government are marching us towards the abyss. All the while they serenade us to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, a song to which half of them trek us scattershot around the globe and to which the other half have forgotten the words. Whereas the former contingent implores us to fly to arms against vicious, ubiquitous enemies intent on depriving us of our rights, a cause for which we are to sacrifice our sacred freedoms, the latter faithlessly clamor for us to unify with the entire world, including with petty despotisms that would use such an overgenerous pretense to effectively destroy us.
Honor and integrity being as foreign to the paper-pushing tyrants who inhabit the halls of government as the contrived values of the world’s tyrannies are to the majority of Americans, we should probe the ultimate source for our burgeoning oppression. One thing is for certain — we did not survive the darkest periods of human history as a free country to be yoked under by the likes of the two-bit charlatans and slipshod masterminds who currently feign to knuckle us under.
What is essential in our liberation is therefore the promulgation of a proper understanding of rights. This will provide us with the moral clarity with which to decipher the conniving sophistries of our would-be rulers. Rights are ineluctably individual and not contingent upon the accidents of nature, such as skin color, place of birth, or sexual disposition. Such qualifications make a mockery of the legal concept of rights and devolve them merely into state-granted privileges. False conceptions of rights, often flown under the banners of high-sounding euphemisms like “civil rights,” do not put conditions upon government, where the onus properly belongs; but rather put conditions upon our individual rights, which are already due us under the auspices of freedom.
More controversially for those already receptive to such argumentation, and hopefully not an irreparable division between those of us who are already individual rights advocates, in route to reaching a properly arrived at consensus, is the source for our rights. While the Founders and those who properly revere them argue that our inalienable rights emanate from God or a Creator, this is not necessarily the case. Counter-intuitively for many, and argued with full awareness of the religious revulsion that such a statement might provoke, rights can be objectively derived from the true aspects of reality, human nature, and life itself.
While the rightfully religious might find such a claim heretical, and those who adhere to pragmatic democracy as a form of government might find this dogmatic, the reasoning for such a position is logical, straightforward, and absolutely conducive to religious observance and practice. No less a mind than Thomas Aquinas’ found that Nature was an expression of God’s will; and therefore, we may observe that which we deem as destructive and deadly fully accords with a common understanding of evil, and that which is creative, productive, and life-sustaining is likewise of good. Such a rational breakdown is crucial to a proper understanding of rights and justice in society.
Property is indispensable to the condition of liberty, which is the right to lead our own lives. Being born into this world as co-equal human beings, essentially rational creatures, we must have the freedom to exercise our faculties in order to be human and thus to achieve happiness. We are not born into a condition of being owned by society or government; this is an affront to reason and morality. What should bind us together as a people is a reverence for life: its creation, furtherance, and promotion. And life cannot be protected or preserved without individual rights or a charitable disposition, the latter being nurtured by a just religion.
Some may appeal to a supernatural defense of our rights in the face of government, as a totem to ward off the enemies of freedom. But oppressors do not hold any regard for such intangible warnings, as real or unreal as they may be. What is essential to understand is that the proper counterweight to government force is popular force; whether prayer animates that force or a self-aware enough regard for one’s rights to vigorously uphold property, liberty, and life in society is inconsequential to the state. After all, the God of the Old Testament mobilized men to take action against their oppressors, whether by flight or by war. It was action that saved the Israelites, not idle prayer.
Thus, while an allowance for religiosity is completely acknowledged as being utterly indispensable to a free republic, the safeguarding of our rights must not rest on an appeal to an invisible protector. Millions of people in the past appealed to such a God without effective and expedient mobilization to action and were nonetheless enslaved and even slaughtered without worldly recourse. We must not relegate justice in this world to resolution in the afterworld. We must uphold what is right in the here-and-now and be the steadfast guardians of our own liberty.
Kyle Becker blogs at RogueGovernment, and can be followed on Twitter as @RogueOperator1. He writes freelance for several publications, including American Thinker, and is a regular commentator on the late night talk show TB-TV.
You say that the safeguarding of our rights “cannot rest upon an appeal to an invisible protector.”
Of all that you said in this you ere. Washington did rest in an invisible protector and his actions were motivated by an active faith in God in whom he trusted to guide his actions as general and later as president.
I am sure you meant to say that safeguarding our rights cannot rest “alone” upon an appeal to an invisible protector.
In that Washington and Adams would agree. But as to your statment as left unamended you would be fatally incorrect.