The Basis of Rights
©Lucio Mascarenhas. April 28th., 2004.
This is in response to some of the posts on the thread,
Incest Legalized
In one of the threads I found this quote, which I noted down, because of its particular relevance to me.
Bishop Fulton Sheen:
Where do we get our rights and liberties which we have to defend? They have a source.
Where do I get the right to free speech?
Where do you get freedom of conscience, freedom of religion?
If you get them from the state of New York, the State of New York could take them away.
Do you get your rights and liberties from the Federal Government in Washington? If you got your rights and liberties from the Federal Government in Washington, the Federal Government in Washington could take them away.
Our Founding Fathers had to face this question, and it was one of the very first that they answered.
They sought for some basis and ground of human rights and liberties, and they found it and set it down in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: It is a self-evident principle that the Creator has endowed man with certain inalienable rights. They cannot be taken away. And among them is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
I live in India, although I am not Indian. Now, in India we have been taught in school (parish school run by Govt. grant and with Govt. approved, Atheist, Evolutionary & Anti-clerical Syllabus) that Indian Citizens are granted their rights by the Indian Constitution.
The Indian Constitution is designed on the Communist Soviet, the Anticlerical French and the anticlerical Irish Constitutions.
I have always argued that this (basic premise, as taught us) is wrong — it cannot be right. Citizens are not 'granted' rights by a Constitution, but have rights as natural and innate to them, superior to any merely human law, and certainly to any Constitution.
That is, a Constitution does not 'grant' citizens their rights, it merely recognizes and records those rights in a fallible manner, as being recorded by fallible men who are capable of error.
The question is: If we assume that there is no God, and a Moral Code imposed and upheld by Him, what can be the basis of human morality? Why should homosexuality, incest, rape, murder, robbery, etc., be considered immoral and unlawful?
The French Anticlericals who made the French Revolution grappled with this question and arrived at the conclusion that "Might is right"... the "norm" or that what is accepted by the mass of the people, and even more exactly, by the dominant group of the masses (the Establishment or Ruling Ascendancy) is right, and what it proscribes is wrong.
Therefore, if the "Norm" of a ruling Class sanctions the dehumanisation of a conquered people, and permits the members of the Class of Victors to take as his personal possessions (i.e., slaves) from the latter class, as for example by the Ruling Muslims from among the Chrisitans and other non-Moslems in Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, West Asia, Pakistan, Indonesia... then this must be legitimate?
This is the same principle that the Apostate English and Lallander Scotch applied to their victims, the English, Scot and Irish Catholics (See
Irish Penal Code). Many Catholics were reduced to white slaves and exported to the English New World, where they, over time, were submerged into the larger Negro population.
Following the collapse of the Mughal Empire, the onetime vassal Kingdom and Nation of Gorkha invaded and conquered its neighbours, more particularly the larger and more prosperous Kingdom of Newar, which name the Gorkha corrupted to Nepal. Today, four hundred years down the line, the non-Gorkha peoples are still treated as slaves, sub-human, which is why their women are treated as easy prey, and are forced into prostitution in large numbers — even exported to the brothels of India in very large numbers. Ditto for "Thailand", where the Siamese have done the same to the Western Laotians and other peoples.
In the USA, most of the native Americans and Negros have been reduced to sub-human levels, and dissipate their time in drunkenness and the like.
There are grave problems with the US Constitutions (Confederate under John Hancock etc and later, Federal under Washington to Lincoln). First, the US did not really have a moral basis to secede from England - the discontent was contrived. Second, the US Constitutions are "Christian Ecumenist" or based on the Protestant "Branch Heresy." Even so, it (the Federalist Constitution inaugerated under Washington) failed to specifically enshrine even this watered-down Ecumenist "Christianity" as against all other belief systems, such as the various Paganisms — on the face of it, a remarkable and fatal piece of short-sightedness. Again, the "Separation of State and Church" is a Heresy — the heresy of Secularism. It is these last two defects that the atheists have exploited to cast out even the nominal, "Oecumenical Christianity" from the organs of State.
Lastly, the USA is instrinsically built up on an avowed Protestantism — and has persisted in this vocation, despite its pretence of tolerating Christianity or Catholicism. It robbed vast stretches of land from Catholic Spain and Mexico, not so much as to expand as to rob Catholicism and glorify Protestantism. Ditto for the Balcanisation of Spain, to create its "backyard" of Banana Republics. Ditto for its latter war against Spain to rob Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the Marianas, etc. The "Monroe Doctrine" was anti-Catholic Hypocrisy. It meant that Spain could not act to reclaim her territories but that they were reserved — by Protestant "Divine Right" — for the USA's Protestant Colonialism!
Lucio Mascarenhas, Bombay
©Lucio Mascarenhas. April 28th., 2004.