Monday, July 7, 2014
399 - About those Unalienable Rights
Spirituality Column #399
July 8, 2014
Current in
Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
About those Unalienable Rights
About those Unalienable Rights
By Bob Walters
“…endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights …” – Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, July
1776
“Rights”
sure have been in the news a lot lately.
“Rights”
are steadfast and assumed. “Rights” are
what I deserve. “Rights” are American
and not to be messed with. “Rights,” by
golly, are endowed by our Creator.
So
as society’s collective head explodes over competing ideas of rights – gay rights,
marriage rights, gun rights, athlete rights, free speech rights, the Bill of
Rights, my rights, your rights, civil rights – we are hearing a whole lot more
about all these “rights” than about the Creator who endowed them.
When
a Federal judge recently and singlehandedly struck down Indiana’s long-standing
ban on gay marriage, one erudite fellow I know called it a victory – finally! – for “rights.” In looking at the media, he definitely is not
alone in that sentiment. But it made me
stop and ask: If rights are that big a deal, where do they really come
from? And if rights do indeed come from the
Creator – i.e., God – then what mechanisms allow us to invoke His supreme authority
and eternal approval on these rights?
The
answers are out there, obvious to discern and easy to find if we sincerely want
them. They are Jesus Christ, the Holy
Spirit, the Bible, and Church. But lately
American secular “rights” have liberally and falsely assumed the authoritative weight
of divine empowerment. Man increasingly
skips over the part where the divine Creator actually IS the divine
empowerment. What I’m hearing is, “I have
rights! I don’t care what God says.” How
twisted is that?
Thomas
Jefferson enumerated the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness.” While not exactly in the
Bible, it is nonetheless remarkable. For men to then design a political system
that guarantees, for the most part, the rights of the individual person over
the whims and caprices of government is history’s greatest political
achievement.
Argue
all you want about who the Christian believers were and weren’t among the
Founding Fathers. But to invoke “rights”
endowed by a Creator they had to embrace the moral authority of the Bible as
God’s word, and appreciate their personal obligation to honor the Creator. Responsibility to God and others is both the
foundation and animating core of our freedom and rights.
Lately,
mankind’s whims and caprices have become “rights.” The Bible is capriciously reinterpreted, rewritten,
redacted, maligned or ignored to enable man’s worldly, temporal happiness to supersede
the Creator God’s eternal glory.
“Rights”
have divine authority only when they glorify God’s creation. That’s a truly unalienable rule.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that humans have done anti-Creator things since the
beginning. That’s why mankind needs
Jesus.
0 comments:
Post a Comment