In the May 20 edition of The IO there’s an article on page 3 entitled, "No Creator, No Rights." The main idea is that rights come from God and there’s the obligatory quote from the Declaration of Independence saying that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights."

Well, what if that’s just a bunch of hooey? It always amazes me that, with so many Christians in the freedom movement, no one has actually investigated whether or not rights do, in fact, come from God. It’s possible, of course, that some have and were disturbed by what they found and decided to remain silent about it.

We’ve been hearing this stuff for so long and it seems like such an invincible argument, in support of such an important pillar in the structure of our relations with the state, why not just leave it alone?

The Founding Fathers may have said that rights came from God but that doesn’t mean they do. Would they lie to us? Consider this: These guys weren’t dummies. They weren’t the type to blindly accept things just because others did. They could think on their own. Whether or not they searched the Bible to find rights would be difficult to determine. You can be sure they spent lots of time studying techniques of governance, yet they gave us the U.S. Constitution, which left the door wide open for the monster that rules us today. The vast majority of people, then or now, could plead ignorance of this fact, but not the Founders. They were well aware of it. And if there’s any doubt that they would sell us a bill of goods, remember that they also told us that, if we don’t like the government we have, we have the right to dissolve it and form one that better suits our needs. Is anyone that dumb?

Our Founders knew human nature and they knew government and they certainly knew that no written document has ever, or will ever, prevent a government, once formed, from growing into a monster. It’s the unalterable nature of the beast.

When they said that rights came from God they were using the Lord’s name in vain; they were expropriating the seal of approval and mantle of authority of the Almighty.

Rights don’t come from God. But don’t take my word for it. Go to Strong’s Concordance and do a word study on rights in the Bible. Of the few uses of the word, the closest thing I found to what we are looking for was a reference to firstborn rights—which was really referring to the custom of the times of giving certain things to firstborn sons. There are no examples of the modern concept of rights as in, "we’ve got something coming," or, "we’re entitled to this."

The Bible doesn’t deal in rights thinking. Neither did the Greeks or Romans or any other classical culture. For Christians especially, but for anyone at all, the point is emphatic: The Bible is God’s wisdom and counsel for living the highest quality life, yet it says nothing at all about rights. There is a good reason for this glaring omission, in light of the importance of rights thinking in modern times: God never instructed us in evil or error and rights thinking is the latter.

The modern intellectual deception called "rights" is mainly a product of 18th century humanism espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, the Founding Fathers and other Masonic types. It was a timely and useful idea. People were becoming restive watching their quality of life steadily eroded by the growing power of the state. "Rights" was an intellectual Prozac intended to calm the patient.

There was a certain mood of dissatisfaction in Europe and America then and a certain vocabulary used to express and discuss it. Our ruling class adopted that vocabulary (as the media does today) and gave us the new form of the age-old thing—central government.

Rights don’t come from God. They come from the mind of man. They’re a pure invention created by the ruling class to mollify the masses and facilitate the next phase of the systematic farming of the human race. We’ve got nothing coming from anyone, especially the state. I know that’s about as welcome a sound as nails on a blackboard but don’t disregard it just because it’s difficult to work with.

Here’s a simple, practical way to put this in a clear perspective:

You say we have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" Okay, let’s use "freedom" as an example and build a model:

1. If we have the will and the power to be free, then we don’t need the right to’ be free.

2. If we don’t have the will and the power to be free, the right won’t do us any good.

3. Therefore, the right to be free, having no effect either way, may be considered void.

When the state takes something from us it doesn’t ask us beforehand if we’re okay with losing it. Not only does the state not care, but often our loss makes us more manageable, which is of great abiding interest to the state. It can’t be overemphasized that the state has no intention of returning what it took. Protesting our loss is just so much whining. It’s degrading. It’s an open admission of our impotence. Worse yet, it’s an acknowledgement of the state’s "right" (sic) to govern us.

Simply plug a perceived right into the model above by replacing the word "free" and read it out loud.

Obviously, the active ingredients are the will and power. God has made these available to us and occasionally the more intrepid and resourceful among us actually take advantage of them. Unfortunately, there are always too few of this type to make a difference. At this point, at least, we don’t have the power to be free.

On the other hand, you would think that the will to be free would be nearly universally present in Man, but alas, it’s not so. Freedom is a difficult and painful thing. Most people, when hard up against the grim reality of life on their own authority continually make choices that land them in progressively deeper bondage. They would rather live with the fool’s illusion that there’s someone to take care of them in their time of troubles and there’s no shortage of those willing to say, "I’m from the government and I’m here to help you."

Much of what the freedom movement does today is whine about our rights or the terrible way the state treats us. It can be argued that, at least these people are doing something. After all, much of what we do amounts to beating our heads against a wall, with little or no progress made, so why criticize those who are making an effort and inspiring others to do the same?

Making an effort is good. Making the right effort is much better. Remember, rights came from the state. The state giveth and the state taketh away (mostly taketh away). Moreover, I discovered that, when I began to cleanse my mind of rights thinking, I began to think more clearly and efficiently about everything. I liked it better.

Ruling classes are notoriously self-centered. They don’t really give anything away. We never won any rights from them. In what constituted a preemptive strike of false generosity, they offered them to us temporarily so we would continue playing their game because they didn’t like the alternative they saw forming—that the realization of the diminishing advantages of playing their game would cause us to seriously consider going off on our own and inventing a new game they didn’t control.

This is pretty close to what Jesus told us to do. He told us that we were to come out from among them; that we were a kingdom within a kingdom; that we were to network among ourselves as much as possible and obey their laws only enough to keep from being murdered or imprisoned by them. He left no instructions for offensive operations against them; no instructions for contentious dialogues with them complaining about the way they treat us.

It may seem like a radical change at first but I think it’s a better way to go.

Note: The first time I ever heard that there is no such thing as a right was four years ago when Civilization Engineer Dennis Riness explained that rights, just like governments, were a construct of man. Like it or not, Riness and Duey are correct: We have no "rights"—we only have each other, our common senses and theological templates telling us how we should live peacefully and cooperatively among one another. (DWH)