From whom do our Rights come from, God (or the Deity or Nature’s God) or those running Government?
The Framers of our Constitutional Republic reverently assumed the former along with the belief that if God has granted us our Rights, no man or assemblage of men can (or of more importance, should) revoke those Rights in their names alone. Thus we are Free for there are boundaries in which our government must not cross. If it is the former, then there are no Rights at all – merely “grants” from an all too ordinary Government from time to time. And if that is so, we are not Free, for there is no boundaries at all, as Government (and the power greedy politicians and bureaucrats embedded in it) can arbitrarily to give at one point and then take away at another.
In a Society and a Government that is becoming more and more secular, the role and importance of God becomes less and less, that the notion that there is a Power Higher than ourselves becomes smaller and smaller – leading to philosophical dismantling of that preventative bulwark that protects the Rights should not be touched. All one has to do to see this happening is the coercion that the Obama Administration is now applying to the Little Sisters of the Poor to give up their religious precepts that are 2000 years old – that they should trade them in for the new secular humanism religion that seems to be the newest religion of the Ruling Class.
If we lose our Freedom of Religion, that bulwark will have been blown wide open – and I can see every other Right, enumerated in the Constitutions and those unenumerated, be co-opted, recalled, and redefined by those in power. From a Free People to a mass subject to the Whims of Politics – a sad legacy that we will have brought upon ourselves. From Locke to Hobbs in a generation.
(H/T: Liberal Logic 101)
