Question:
Was Jefferson right in claiming that our equality, liberty, and natural rights depend on the Creator?
Bruce
2008-05-17 08:15:46 UTC
Jefferson grounded our claims of equality, liberty, and the right to life in the endowment of the Creator, following the Judeo-Christian claim that the Creator made man in his image and provides a special status to us among his creatures.

However, atheists deny the existence of the Creator while still affirming claims of equality, liberty, and natural rights. Could there be some other objective basis for our rights, or are the atheists just whistling in the dark?
Eleven answers:
johninjc
2008-05-17 08:33:11 UTC
Great question. Jefferson knew that if our rights came from our Creator they could not be taken away by man.



Gazoo, you should read more about Jefferson, he was rewriting the Bible to put things in chronological order. Here is what he said about his rewriting of the Bible.



http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefLett.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=237&division=div1

To Charles Thomson

Monticello, January 9, 1816

I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus,
joanie
2016-05-25 03:38:11 UTC
Just a quick note - Jefferson and the Founders (that would be a great band name, I think!) were Deists and did not believe in the same Creator that Christians do. Let us not look to our past on how we came to be. It doesn't matter that we were "rather accidental mutations of some apelike creature." We can think and reason. And, because of that, we are able to justify our claims of equality, freedom and natural rights. Like in all species on this earth, we have a natural order in our society. And like all other species on this planet, we can learn to adapt to changes in our environment. It has nothing to do with this Creator, which I'm sure many Christians assume is theirs, which it isn't.
?
2008-05-17 08:32:54 UTC
I think the belief in inalienable rights endowed by the Creator is essential to understand human rights as inviolate. If the rights are given by man (or the state), the rights can be taken by man.



Deny a belief in the Creator and all that is left of human rights is subjective morality.
anonymous
2008-05-17 08:24:28 UTC
Jefferson is a complex case. He rewrote the New Testament because he didn't believe most of it: http://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Bible-Thomas/dp/B000I0RSQ6/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204926385&sr=8-1



So he certainly wasn't a Christian. Not even a little. No Christian would re-write the Bible.



He was some type of Deist, and he thought that freedom was the natural order.



Honestly...I don't have that much of a beef with the Deists. I just see it without evidence, but not destructive like Christianity. I think that if Jefferson had access to modern science, he might have felt different.
Hera Sent Me
2008-05-17 08:22:02 UTC
The Constitution, written later and having the force of law, is a more mature humanist document, in which the Founders no longer find in necessary to appeal to a Creator for legitimacy.



The Constitution says flatly it gets its authority from "The People", not some god, and that humans are entitled to certain rights simply by virtue of their humanness.
James O
2008-05-17 12:11:30 UTC
Yes, without the Creator and objective moral laws, the only law will be(and has been) :"Might makes right"
OPM
2008-05-17 09:10:02 UTC
No, not really, because Jefferson as mentioned above wasn't a Christian. About half the founders either were not Christian, or were at best "nominal," Christians for public show. Jefferson is clearly not in the Christian camp, in his writings you will see that the Creator is Nature's God, which was Enlightenment code for a contrast to Jacob's God. Nature's God made the laws of the universe and walked away never to be seen or heard from again. He was following in the Greek Natural Law tradition. So it would be a complex statement, but Jefferson would probably have said that nature itself reveals that men are naturally equal and free and that "natural" rights are self evident in the physical nature of being human. As an example, and one quoted by the Massachusetts's Supreme Court in legalizing gay marriage, there is a "natural" right to marry. It is inherent in our species. As such, the state has no authority to determine who can or cannot marry, subject to the state's protective authority to prevent physical harm, such as in a shotgun wedding or to prevent incest or some other form of violence or duress. As such, it is in the nature of our species to pair bond. For other animals, this is not the case and so they would have no "natural right" to be married.



The Massachusetts's Supreme Court went further in pointing out that its constitution is a constitution written during the Revolution and defines state powers very narrowly. All other powers are natural to people. It went on to point out that in statutory law, since the Puritans were anti-Catholic and Catholics said marriage was a religious institution, marriage was defined in Massachusetts as having no religious component being only a secular contract between two people.



I point this out because the early religious thinking doesn't jive in most parts of the United States with modern religious thinking. The civil penalty for failing to attend Church in Massachusetts at the time of the Puritans was to have your tongue nailed to a post for a full day. You would be removed from the post only the next day, after people egged you and so forth. Likewise, prior to the passage of religious freedom, being a Baptist in Virginia was punishable by death. It was Jefferson's work that lead to allowing people to be free from persecution due to their religion. It was his opposition to religion and hence self interest that he propose that autonomy of person, expressed in natural rights like the freedom to choose religion, was our national goal.



That, by the way, is why in the early 19th century you see pro-slavery arguments being ones on the nature of blacks intelligence, skills and so forth. They were naturally inferior and hence had to be protected like children and could not make choices for themselves and so on. It was the argument of the "White Man's Burden." An argument from religion would have fell flat on its face until about the 1920's in the United States and really not until the mid 1980's was religion a credible source of legislative decision making.



So the American Constitution is grounded in a morality driven by science, given the Jeffersonian ideals, and not at all by religion. Jefferson did feel Jesus was an important moral philosopher and put him above or below others in stature depending on the period in his life. His bible as mentioned above removes any miracle related items, or anything that would imply the existence of a god or that Jesus was a god. He felt his followers were frauds and made it up to get followers.
anonymous
2008-05-17 08:19:57 UTC
You DO realize that Jefferson was NOT a christian, right?



"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Archibald Carey, 1816
Darth Veda
2008-05-17 08:35:59 UTC
Bible says: God works all things (including nature and atheists) according to the counsel of His will... So yes our 'rights' are dependent entirely on God's will...
asylum31
2008-05-17 08:20:17 UTC
Social Contract maybe?
anonymous
2008-05-17 08:29:48 UTC
and Benjamin Franklin said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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