Newt Gingrich is a very smart guy, but lacks integrity, and I’m skeptical of the sincerity of his newfound faith.
, which comes as he seems to be preparing to run for president
Last month, Gingrich made a very public conversion to the Catholic faith of his wife, Callista. As Gingrich continues his rediscovery of God in America, watch for more quotes like this one from last Friday's conference: “I am not a citizen of the world,” he said. 'I am a citizen of the United States, because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”
While I’m not a fan of Mike Huckabee, I do believe his faith is sincere. Gingrich knows full well that U.S citizenship is not dependent on a religious test, while there are in fact established religions in many other nations, which makes his statement that only in the U.S. does citizenship start with faith a deliberate and knowing lie told to an audience he hopes will lap it up.
Rick, do you believe that human rights are grounded in a personal God? (I.e. – a God who is a person, not non-personal?)
If not, how would you ground human rights, or would you say they were illusory?
Comment by Wintery Knight — June 10, 2009 @ 11:25 am
Without a god who can reliably communicate with humankind, human rights have to be grounded in reason and in empirical observations that are self-evident.
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.
Comment by Rick Heller — June 11, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
No my concern is ontological, not epistemological, so leave the rule book out of it. What is the ground of human rights on atheism? It seems to me that you would have to say that human rights are just the subjective ideas of some group of people.
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?
Comment by Wintery Knight — June 11, 2009 @ 6:02 pm
Well, even if you’re right, god doesn’t solve the problem if there is no god.
Comment by Rick Heller — June 13, 2009 @ 9:40 am
It seems to me that even if we do posit a god, then that wouldn’t solve the problem of how to ground human rights because that would take us into the famous Euthyphro Problem which was first outlined in Plato’s dialog with that name (see:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html), concerning how we ground morality.
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.â€
Comment by Jim Farmelant — July 2, 2009 @ 6:35 am