Michael Lind on the Roots of Natural Rights
"America is not a Christian Nation", Salon.com (April 14, 2009).
In reality, neither Jewish nor Christian traditions know anything of
the ideas of natural rights and social contract found in Hobbes,
Gassendi and Locke. That's because those ideas were inspired by themes
found in non-Christian Greek and Roman philosophy. Ideas of the social
contract were anticipated in the fourth and fifth centuries BC by the
sophists Glaucon and Lycophron, according to Plato and Aristotle, and
by Epicurus, who banished divine activity from a universe explained by
natural forces and taught that justice is an agreement among people
neither to harm nor be harmed. The idea that all human beings are equal
by nature also comes from the Greek sophists and was planted by the
Roman jurist Ulpian in Roman law: "quod ad ius natural attinet, omnes
hominess aequales sunt" — according to the law of nature, all human
beings are equal. ¶ Desperate to obscure the actual intellectual roots of the
Declaration of Independence in Greek philosophy and Roman law,
Christian apologists have sought to identify the "Creator" who endows
everyone with unalienable rights with the revealed, personal God of
Moses and Jesus. But a few sentences earlier, the Declaration refers to
"the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Adherents of natural rights
liberalism often have dropped "Nature's God" and relied solely on
"Nature" as the source of natural rights.
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