Right to Life
I've been thinking recently about rights. Specifically, the right to life. And I've decided, I don't really believe anyone has a “right” to life.
Sure, our country was founded on the premise that every citizen has an automatic “right” to be alive, along with some other rights that we use as the basis for our social system. That doesn't mean that I have to believe in them. Our country was also founded on the premise that God exists, yet we don't require our citizens to believe in Him, either. Yet.
Back to rights. It just doesn't seem to me to make sense that anyone has a “right” to be alive. Most of us have a strong desire to stay alive, and we do many things in order to ensure that we remain alive for a long time. But just because I am capable of staying alive doesn't give me the right to, any more than my ability to knock you down and take your wallet gives me the right to do that.
If you don't believe in God, and you don't believe in the soul, if you believe that we are all meat, and when we die we just stop, then there really can't be any “rights” at all. Without some entity to grant you those rights, you don't have them. Not in the larger scheme, that is.
If you believe that you have a soul, and that your soul continues on after your death, either to go to some better place for eternity, or to be reborn into another body until you reach some sort of enlightenment, then there really is no need for a right to life. After all, your soul is immortal, and the body is just a machine for carrying around your soul. If you die, you either get a new body sooner or later, or you go off to Paradise and live happily ever after. Sounds like a fair trade to me.
And if you do believe in God, and the soul and all that, then you either believe that He loves all his creations equally, and doesn't place any one being above another, or that He made you and all the other humans better and more special than every other living thing on Earth. If you believe the first one, then you again have no right to life, or, at least, you have the same right to life that every other creature on Earth has. But what if there is a conflict? When the fox is chasing the rabbit, does the rabbit complain that his right to life is being violated? No, he runs like hell. Sometimes he lives, sometimes he dies. Neither he nor the fox debates the issue.
So if every creature has the same right to life, then no creature really has any right to life, because something else has an equal right to take that life from them. That's pretty much the same as having no rights at all.
But what if you believe that humans are more important than all other creatures, and that we totally have the right to life, even at the expense of the lives of everything else? And what if the conflict is between two human lives? Who keeps their rights, and who loses them? And who decides?
You can see that the debate could go on forever, for every individual case, and never get resolved. That's why I don't believe we actually have the right to life. Just like the rest of life on Earth, you pays your money and you takes your chances. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. What are you going to do when you get to Heaven, call God and tell him you want to sue the guy who killed you? Where are you going to find a lawyer?
I've been thinking recently about rights. Specifically, the right to life. And I've decided, I don't really believe anyone has a “right” to life.
Sure, our country was founded on the premise that every citizen has an automatic “right” to be alive, along with some other rights that we use as the basis for our social system. That doesn't mean that I have to believe in them. Our country was also founded on the premise that God exists, yet we don't require our citizens to believe in Him, either. Yet.
Back to rights. It just doesn't seem to me to make sense that anyone has a “right” to be alive. Most of us have a strong desire to stay alive, and we do many things in order to ensure that we remain alive for a long time. But just because I am capable of staying alive doesn't give me the right to, any more than my ability to knock you down and take your wallet gives me the right to do that.
If you don't believe in God, and you don't believe in the soul, if you believe that we are all meat, and when we die we just stop, then there really can't be any “rights” at all. Without some entity to grant you those rights, you don't have them. Not in the larger scheme, that is.
If you believe that you have a soul, and that your soul continues on after your death, either to go to some better place for eternity, or to be reborn into another body until you reach some sort of enlightenment, then there really is no need for a right to life. After all, your soul is immortal, and the body is just a machine for carrying around your soul. If you die, you either get a new body sooner or later, or you go off to Paradise and live happily ever after. Sounds like a fair trade to me.
And if you do believe in God, and the soul and all that, then you either believe that He loves all his creations equally, and doesn't place any one being above another, or that He made you and all the other humans better and more special than every other living thing on Earth. If you believe the first one, then you again have no right to life, or, at least, you have the same right to life that every other creature on Earth has. But what if there is a conflict? When the fox is chasing the rabbit, does the rabbit complain that his right to life is being violated? No, he runs like hell. Sometimes he lives, sometimes he dies. Neither he nor the fox debates the issue.
So if every creature has the same right to life, then no creature really has any right to life, because something else has an equal right to take that life from them. That's pretty much the same as having no rights at all.
But what if you believe that humans are more important than all other creatures, and that we totally have the right to life, even at the expense of the lives of everything else? And what if the conflict is between two human lives? Who keeps their rights, and who loses them? And who decides?
You can see that the debate could go on forever, for every individual case, and never get resolved. That's why I don't believe we actually have the right to life. Just like the rest of life on Earth, you pays your money and you takes your chances. Sometimes you live, sometimes you die. What are you going to do when you get to Heaven, call God and tell him you want to sue the guy who killed you? Where are you going to find a lawyer?
abbiss:
I don't believe in those rights never. But can live without them, which is already great!
arrabbiata_von_p:
