Kate Smith’s rendition inspired Woody Guthrie to respond with “This Land is Your Land.”

Patrick—who is ruddy faced and whose beard was once a bright orange but is now gray.

Classic theism attempted to solve the problem of providing a foundation for morality (and presumably also human rights) by taking God as the foundation. God is the ultimate law giver. But that raises the old question as to whether something is right because God commands it or whether God commands it because it is right? If we opt for the latter, then the commandments of God cannot be the ultimate foundation for morality because there must exist a logically independent morality which we use to judge the rightness of God’s commandments. If we opt for the former position, then we risk reducing the proposition that ‘God’s commandments are right,’ to a mere tautology.

A.J. Ayer, for example,in his book The Central Questions of Philosophy made that very point, first quoting from Bertrand Russell – “Theologians have always taught that God’s decrees are good, and that this is not a mere tautology: it follows that goodness is logically independent of God’s decrees.” Ayer, himself, then went on to state that, “The point that moral standards can never be justified merely by an appeal to authority, whether that authority is taken to be human or divine. There has to be the additional premiss that the person whose dictates we are to follow is good, or that what he commands is right, and this cannot be the mere tautology that he is what he is, or that he commands what he commands.”

Again, why should someone, on atheism, care about the pain of others? If it makes them happy to cause pain to others, why should they refrain from doing so, on atheism? What is the ontology of this moral obligation? To whom is it owed? Why should anyone follow it when it goes against their self-interest to do so? It seems to me that your view is YOUR VIEW, so why would I act on the basis of YOUR VIEW, on atheism?

The basic observation is that people seek to avoid pain and suffering, and seek pleasure and happiness. Therefore, human rights seeks to protect people from enduring the grossest forms of pain and suffering, and allowing them the freedom to pursue basic pleasures, like that of having a home and family.

Not having a rule book makes it a bit harder, but on the other hand, if the rule book is inaccurate (as you will probably agree is true of those scriptures that are not accepted by your religion) that can big problems too.

If not, how would you ground human rights, or would you say they were illusory?