No offense to anyone, and I sympathize, but I think we'd have done a lot better if we had soft-pedaled the religion stuff a lot sooner in the game.
For example, as much as these things may be "G-d-given" rights, referring to them as "natural rights" would have appealed to larger segments of the population.
"Clinging to their guns and Bibles." was a powerful public relations victory. I've said it before: the Leftists have a much better handle on PR than we do. We are in Kindergarten by comparison.
Yeah, I've heard it before that soft-pedaling the religious aspect of politics would somehow be offensive to G-d, but if I may speak for G-d (as everyone else claims to), it strikes me that sometimes fighting the battle without handicapping ourselves by dumb PR moves would be better.
Be as passionately religious within your own garden gates as you want, but soft pedal your religious fervor otherwise.
There are times when it would be better to hide your faith under a basket.
I said it, I've said it before, and I'll say it again when necessary.
Terry, 230RN
Reality is offensive to many yet it is still reality.
You are wrong. Soft peddling the religious nature of natural rights is a mistake. (don't be mad at me for being blunt)
If rights are a part of reality then drilling down to the beginning, the foundation of reality is paramount.
Either life came to be through chaos and mechanics or through design, design implies a BEING not mechanics.
The operating principle of reality is either order or it is chaos. There is no balance, one or the other prevails and will eventually prevail permanently. Choose your side wisely.
Either there is a telos, a purpose to everything (outside of your mind) or there is no purpose, no meaning to anything. Just impersonal interactions of impersonal, non-being, stuff.
Either BEING is first and is the ground floor of reality or non-being is first and the ground floor of reality, a materialism ruled by entropy, everything flowing downhill from here to heat death.
Your position is the position of the modern philosophers.
Time + chaos does not eventually bring forth a being known here as 230RN.
Time + chaos only equals chaos. To get anything else requires an intervention of order by a rational being imposing his will.
There is an ordering principle, an ordering law to reality. There is absolutely zero evidence or reason to believe that everything is the result of chaos and chance. Zero evidence.
In fact all the evidence, including the obvious, personal transcendent experience of "being" you are experiencing right now as you read this scream out in opposition to that irrational position.
I'm a fan of natural law only because it is a halfway house to acknowledging the reality of natures God.
We are where we are (a world of confusion) because of the soft peddling the foundations of rational thought, the Creator.
The true foundation is the rational Creator who created a universe that is knowable by rational creatures.
Not only is the universe knowable, but the Creator is knowable to all those who seek Him.
Rights are bound to the nature of being.
The ultimate Being, God, has given us rights and obligations.
Shall we obey God or man?