Natural Rights vs God-given Rights

In nature, there are predators and prey, carnivores, herbivores and omnivores. There are some where males fight to the death to establish dominance over a troop.

Some libertarians talk about “natural rights” when talking about humans.

It is my belief that natural rights are a logical extension of the obvious and natural differences between humans and animals. The atheist libertarians that have most articulated the philosophy, for the most part, have extrapolated the NAP (and other axioms and conclusions) from those differences, and respective characteristics, to get to “natural rights” ideas.

From my perspective, Austrian economics is the best example of the application of eternal principles articulated in the Bible, even the 10 Commandments. Atheists and agnostics reject the 1st Commandment but are still responsible for living up to at least the NAP as a logical “corollary” of the NAP.

But nature operates according to certain rules, with scientific disciplines purporting to be about teasing those rules out from observations of nature.

But you cannot define nature as a coherent entity with creative powers. The law of entropy is an axiomatic principle that recognizes that nature acts in the way described. Nature has no independent agency and cannot overrule itself.

But human agency can. Some may say there is no free will, but ask one if he can change his mind if he wants to. He might say no, but many of them have changed their mind. Most physicists acknowledge quantum fluctuation, for example, and the “uncertainty principle”.

But now atheists that recognize principles of Austrian economics and how the free market works better than other economic models in human society, also have to explain why the NAP that is necessary for a true free market, does not work for ants.

“They’re not human” is an obvious answer, but when you ask them why humans are different they have to fall back on non-theistic answers that do not really explain it, if humans came to be through the same processes as ants.

So what is the essence in nature that requires natural rights?

My answer is that there has to be an “intentional agency” that made the rules. The rules that nature has not choice but to live by, and the rules that are implied by how human societies work best. Even an atheists like Mises and Rothbard have deduced a corollary of “the law of love” as the minimum rule for society to work in a way that is the optimum best for the aggregate, the NAP: no one person supplanting another’s volition by force, coercion, or fraud.

To sum it up, even atheists who subscribe to the NAP are able to deduce certain principles from certain axioms of human action, rules that explain how nature actually works in human society. It can even explain what happens when some humans violate the NAP.

They start from nature. But nature also has rules and Mises started from scratch from those rules in “Human Action” to derive how human societies and economics actually work.

But looking at nature, you can also make certain sure deductions. The laws of entropy, for example, there is no law of nature that any branch of science has been able to come up with an explanation as to why the laws of entropy and the strong anthropic principle can be universal rules for the cosmos without being able to deduce that there is an intelligent agency to engineer it, with the power to create it.

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Beware of disdain for Bible truth

Open letter to an author at https://www.lewrockwell.com..

I have written you before about mistaken perceptions about Christian Bible believers. Most self-described evangelicals are stupidly dupes of the state, what else is new? Jesus said long before you were born that the “children of this generation are wiser than the children of light”. They are some of them. Characters like Rothbard, Walter Block, Laurence Vance, Norman Horn, Chuck Baldwin, these are only representative of tens, probably hundreds of thousands, of Christians, maybe even millions, who are banned from conservative and liberal (government-permitted) media as non-persons, along with ex-homosexuals, abortion survivors, and you yourself. Yes, and opponents of “green socialism”.

First thing is to stop thinking they’re any more monochrome as atheists and agnostics, who run the entire gamut (just like Christians, and even evangelicals as such), from total totalitarians to die-hard complete anarchists (such as myself, Jesus Christ, and God himself). Although statistically atheists, agnostics and unbelievers tend MUCH more heavily toward the totalitarian side than Christians. As such outstanding atheists and agnostics as Rothbard and Walter Block and Herman Hoppe have acknowledged. (Although some superstitious pagan religions and most anti-Christian religious regimes in history show similar tendencies).

Second – The tendency to include little swipes like the out-of-context mention of Mike Pence, Adam and Eve, and Noah’s Ark shows a weakness toward intellectual hubris shared by many non-libertarian atheists and so-called skeptics.

REMINDER: Isaac Newton (who wrote more about Christianity and prophecy than science and math), Michael Faraday, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, these also “believe[d] in Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark”. So does Russell Humphrey, a scientist with a significant number of patents in very large-scale electro-magnetic mechanics, who accurately predicted the measurements of the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune (based on GENESIS ONE), confirmed by the Voyager II fly-by, to the shame of NASA scientists who were exponentially wrong, wrong, wrong. NASA learned then not to make a prediction about Mercury, but Humphrey’s was vindicated again.

Romanian creationist Nicolae C. Paulescu announced the discovery of insulin in 1921. The two Canadians who got the Nobel Prize for the discovery later apologized to Paulescu for misunderstanding his paper on the subject due to their faulty French. The Nobel Committee has never apologized for this slight or other blacklisting of creationists.

Creationist Raymond Damadian discovered the principles of MRI scanning.

Creationists ridiculed the idea of non-functional “vestigial organs” and “vestigial DNA” the very instant the terms were publicized.

Creationists from decades before the political academic elites theorized that variations within species in reaction to environmental conditions were managed by natural mechanisms within the genome itself. Not in a neo-Lamarckian sense, as Stephen Gould wrote about, but adaptations were built-in, part of the design. Note also that Stephen Gould said that gradual evolution as understood at that time, was not reflected at all in the fossil record. Instead of accepting that the fossils were a proof against Darwinism, he originated the “punctuated equilibrium” theory: spurts so fast they left no evidence. I call it the first “science” theory that is based on the lack of evidence for it. This is

The Bible anticipated DNA: “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” – Psalm 139:16

There is a description of the effect of an atomic bomb, even a “neutron bomb”, in Zecariah 14:12: ”
And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.”

This is the foreknowledge of prophecy.

Austrian economics is anticipated by Biblical economics, which adds some spiritual truths on top of it. Statism of ALL forms is condemned outright by scripture, notwithstanding the bloviations of both atheists and Christians against this fact based on narrow-colored glasses, and “we can do nothing against the truth but for the truth”.

Why did Americans accept “modern” substitutes for their (KJ) BIbles?

I am a “product” of the Jesus movement, and my father was a Pentecostal pastor, associated by some people with the rise of the Pentecostal movement, and I once briefly worked with Charismatic-associated missionary organization.

All of that has nothing to do with a more “accessible” Bible.

The KJB never lost “accessibility”. American Christians only began to accept substitutes in the post-WWII years. “Acceptance” got more traction in England earlier, surely due to their nobility-class oriented culture, or the push in clerical circles for it earlier on, and more centralization of clerical authority. And the ascendance of man’s wisdom over God’s wisdom with the quicker takeover of Darwin’s revived ancient pagan myth, dressed up in “modern language”.

There was also the decay in the faith of pastors educated in the seminaries, which became hotbeds for deviation from the faith of the fathers. Questioning miracles, Creation, and so on, and the heavy drumbeat in the media that youngsters were getting their news from, like a run of about a decade I remember that Time Magazine always put the Jesus Seminar foolishness on their front cover. Add to that the commands from wickedness in high places to expunge God from education and from city squares. Young people in my generation were indoctrinated with doubt and godlessness.

I was part of that Jesus’ people movement in fact for many years. I used the KJB without a good understanding of why except that it was obviously “stronger” language.

Believers did NOT have a problem with it in the 1950s, and even them most scholars, including in Divinity School with lots of alphabet titles after their names, would have said that the average KING JAMES Bible reader was of less scholarly education than readers of “modern” translations.

Too many babies, or too many thieves and vipers?

I never said that anybody who said there was “overpopulation” was a Malthus or a Sanger. But they use the same argument as Margaret Sanger did about poor people. The main difference is they are not creating an organization like she did whose purpose is to eliminate as many “unfit” and poor people as possible, and by the way, eugenically determined bad racial stock (according to her and her fellow arrogant elites).

I do agree that #1, I would advise people not to have more kids than they would be able to support adequately, but I will not be so arrogant as to presume that my opinion on the matter counts more than theirs. If you don’t have the faith for it, don’t have them, use contraception or abstention. #2 There are too many families that have to live too scarcely in the world.

But item #2 has a cause, and the cause is NOT because the poor are obeying the first Biblical commandment that God gave mankind.

It’s because there are too many thieves and vipers in central banks who use their network of friends and secret societies to execute their plots against the rest of us and rob the nations with their sneaky tactics. The tactics are ever more transparent now with some corners of the Internet still free for information interchange.

For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad. – Luke 8:17

So why agree with these liars and deceivers, when in reality, it is the political class, the arrogant class, the robber cliques, the deceivers, that are the cause? And there is a streak of paganism here, because it is a camel’s nose, and the camel is the infant sacrifices made in old times to the gods of Mammon, Molech, and Baal. This is one reason the command government is pushing so hard for contraceptives that serve also as abortifacients.

By the way, that was the hidden back story of the Hobby Lobby case. They did not object to paying for contraception, actually. Obamacare listed all the FDA approved “contraceptives”. Hobby Lobby had already provided coverage for 16 different contraceptives, including the “birth control pill”. They objected to the other ones that are abortifacients, according to the only possible scientific and objective definition of a new human being, that being the genome in the chromosomes of the zygote. That’s another term for what God showed David in Psalm 138, “God’s book” as it is called there.

The lie of “overpopulation” and “too many babies” comes from the Father of Lies, after all, because he is right now “seeking whom he may devour”, because he “knoweth he hath but a short time” left before Jesus comes back and slays his Beast with the Sword that cometh from the mouth of the Lion of Judah himself and puts Lucifer in chains.

He hates people, it’s not “overpopulation” [sic] he hates, it’s anybody who is born, including his Satan worshippers, Luciferians, and other spiritually useful idiots as he regards them, like he manipulated Eve.

Because every single human being that is born has the potential to be a saved soul. And Satan demands human sacrifice.

The backwards thinking of “regressives”

Marriages were originally IMPLICIT contracts between two parties, and often withh the families engaged. Most were common law marriages, they just moved in together, the aspirant having had the okay of the father. (Fathers know guys better than the daughters do, at least back in those days).

The fact of the matter is, the natural nuclear family (husband, wife, children) is the institution that cultivates the strongest protection against state oppression. That went out the window with the push for state indoctrination of the next generations disguised as “free” academic education and then “forced” induction into the indoctrination centers.

The other institution that cultivates protection against meek pushover subservience to oppressors’ memes are religious institutions, this according to prominent agnostic economist and libertarian writer Murray Rothbard and atheist economist Walter Block.

No wonder Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that they had to exterminate the “bourgeois” institution of marriage and family. Total devotion to the collectivist mentality of worker ants is their goal.  The lying viper never wanted a “workers’ paradise”, he wanted his own special groups to dictate.

The modern heirs of Malthus and Marx think there are too many poor people in the world. That’s why they want to “protect” us from bad people, push groupthink, collectivist mentality. They think like the Orwellian uppermost crust of the “Inner Party”, like the Animal Farm where everyone has to be EQUAL but SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

So they push Groupthink disguised as “diversity”;

Inequality disguised as “equality”;

Unemployment disguised as “minimum wage”, now morphed to “living wage”;

Racism and racial preferences disguised as “anti-racism”, “affirmative action”,

Censorship and enforcement of group-think disguised as “equality” under the law;

Bullying libertarians, whistleblowers, pro-lifers and those of religious faith, and those who think differently under the guise of “equality” as a meaningless rant and “non-discrimination”,

Violating religious liberty under the guise of claiming to defend it;

And generally wearing sheepskin while inside they are “ravenous wolves”.

 

Does God punish the innocent for the sins of others?

I suggest a new perspective on the passage used by a webmaster at the link http://www.religioustolerance.org/sin_trans.htm:

“Yes, God can personally take an active role in transferring punishment among generations from the guilty to the innocent:

…for which you quoted:  “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them (idols), nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”

My comment to the writer follows here (comments are not accepted at the web pages there).

Spiritually speaking, especially after the universally expiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for the sins of the world for all those who believe in him, I do not know of any Christian theology or Christian teacher that says that the sins of the unbeliever can be laid at the feet of another. Jesus is THE Sacrificial Lamb, period.

As to consequences in the world, the quoted scripture is best understood in its context. The very next verse shows that it is not set in stone, so to speak:

“And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.” – Exodus 20:6

It is also best to take this in the context of even the laws of Moses it’s in. I doubt you know how much it’s mentioned, your tolerance theme does not seem to reach into much Biblical scholarship. Many pastors may not have satisfactory answers, but that’s true about many, many things, in some groups more than others.

Rahab, Ruth, Naaman, even Abraham himself were raised in wicked cultures and renounced the sins of their pagan upbringing, so Exodus 20:5 cannot mean that there is an inescapable scapegoating of the children in the sense implied by your quote. It’s illogical for one who believes the Bible, whether they see it or not, no matter.

The passage is true, though, in this physical world, as a general spiritual truth as good as gravity. The children suffer for the sins of the parents and grandparents, as a natural consequence. Those raised in a culture that practices child sacrifice is more likely to follow suit. Those raised by abusive parents are more likely to have problems that affect children and grandchildren. We now have fourth generation welfare babies who are suffering for the sins of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. We have even great-grandchildren suffering for the sins of the evil American Congress of 1913, who inflict us to this day with the evil oppressions of the Federal Reserve Bank so-called, fiat currency, and the income tax, and the sins of our own antecedents that accepted this.

The God of the Bible is a God of love and of perfect justice.

“And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.” – Exodus 20:6

It is also best to take this in the context of even the laws of Moses it’s in. I doubt you know how much it’s mentioned, your tolerance theme does not seem to reach into much Biblical scholarship. Many pastors may not have satisfactory answers, but that’s true about many, many things, in some groups more than others.
Rahab, Ruth, Naaman, even Abraham himself were raised in wicked cultures and renounced the sins of their pagan upbringing, so Exodus 20:5 cannot mean that there is an inescapable scapegoating of the children in the sense implied by your quote. It’s illogical for one who believes the Bible, whether they see it or not, no matter.

Sam Adams is a patriotic hold out

Disclaimer: I am not a defender of any Koch brother or any corporation, and none of this should be misunderstood. It is still obvious to me that all “taxation” is theft by a conquering power or seized from a conquering power by another elite. Christians should read the last several verses of Matthew 17 to understand why Jesus Christ paid taxes. ( Another hint is found in the “Agree with thine adversary quickly..[..because…]” scripture.) After all, Jesus was very angry with the money changers and had nothing good to say about stealing.

So now we have Brooke Sutherland at the Bloomberg Business web site with an article titled “Sam Adams Could Turn Benedict Arnold Because of Taxes. What a teaser, and the teaser is backwards!

Reading the article, the reader finds out -if you didn’t know (I didn’t) that the brewery that makes Sam Adams Beer is majority controlled by one of the Koch Brothers. You then find out that the problem is the stupid bipartisan tax code of both Stupid Parties has made it major STUPID for companies to bring profits back home from their investments overseas.

As a former missionary who lived overseas for a time, I found that the US is one of only two or three nations in the world that taxes its citizens working overseas. But get this: not only US citizens, but anybody who has a U.S. issued green card!

Lo and behold, several paragraphs down from the why-paragraph, you finally find out that 90 percent, that’s ninety percent! of the beer made in the USA is made by foreign-owned companies. So Koch’s Sam Adams is a holdout and exposing the dark hypocritical underbelly of the politicians that use the corporate profits kept overseas for demagoguery, because they get donations from the executives and workers of those same companies.

But a Koch brother company has continued to pay more in taxes that he had to legally, while other companies that support the bipartisan Fabian socialist regime park their profits overseas.

Jesus will come again soon enough (or none too soon?) and cast out the thieving money changers and lying sons of Satan again.

 

Copernicus, the Printing Press and the Reformation

Some secular writers need some  education on the realities of history. As we can see in looking around us, neither good nor bad “religion” suffered at all from Copernicus’ theory, and neither did God, any more than it did from the pagan mass murders of the Roman emperors, or at the hand of the atheist and secular mass murderers of the Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Maoist regimes.

They even admit that at first the Pope himself was pleased to learn from Copernicus. Then came the secular “science” lobby with its emotional attachment to their own clinging to Aristotle instead of Ptolemy, and they found a way to convince the Church Establishment that their pet paradigm was scriptural and the Church itself was in peril if it did not accept the established “consensus” view of science”, their take on it.

After all, the geocentric view was taken from one of the secular/pagan Greek traditions, not the Biblical. We have the same problem today.

False “Religion” took a blow because it cowed to the secular lobby then, until new generations took to the new paradigm. This happened as well with Mendelssohn’s inheritance experiments with plants, until Darwin’s ideas were “safe” enough to let it hit the presses.

And then the howls of pain at the very idea that the universe had a beginning like the Bible said, earning this discovery the atheist pejorative of “The Big Bang”.

The process of liberation from the religious and secular leaders began NOT with Copernicus but the process began more with the printing press, which made it easier to spread ideas, and made Bible reading available to many times as many people. Therefore, while John Huss had been burned at the stake for his Bible-believing heresy, the ideas of freedom that the Bible itself had spread lit the fire in Martin Luther’s bosom and inspired his friends in nobility to hide him from the oppressor.

And while a lot of Christian kings including King James himself believed in a false doctrine of “divine right of kings”, what the Bible itself teaches is that ungodly and unrighteous kings don’t have any such “right” at all. It is a testament to the man himself and to the King James Bible that the translation that is known by his name today rings a death knell for any “divine right” of anybody to rule over anybody else.

In fact it is very clear that God himself was very angry with the Israeli elders when they demanded a king at all to rule over them. People who want kings (or rulers, or even representatives) to rule over them are declaring that they do not want God to rule their lives.

Jesus wisely replied to his enemies, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”,  meaning render NOTHING unto him that you are not forced to do under threat of violence. Jesus’ lesson the apostles at the end of Matthew 17 makes clear that kings and conquerors are thieves by definition. “We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.”

 

Holographic universe?

We communicate with each other using language. All languages must have a way to distinguish facts from logic and the conclusions that facts plus logic results in.

There is no “truth that replaced” an earlier truth. The objective truth, the kind of truth that the scientific method HELPS us find, through TESTING the ideas we have, that is the truth of the real world.

If you have an idea that overlays the world, and you think it’s all a hologram (I’ve read about this idea), that doesn’t mean it is. You have to show us exactly what that means in terms that the rest of us can understand and test.

Almost all religions and superstitions were beliefs that were not “truths replaced” but they diminished in their acceptance because they did not match empirical facts.

The Christian context for “Western civilization” meant a culture that believed in a God that was consistent. He was not capricious or given to whims and fancy like the pagan gods. This is the point Isaac Newton made.

Isaac Newton said the very fact that the practice of science was possible and resulted in consistent verifiable and repeatable results was compelling evidence that there was a God. In other words, he was a supporter of the idea we now know as “intelligent design”.

The SETI project shows us that anti-creationist scientists have no problem with the science of determining whether there is intelligent design in a physical phenomenon as a scientific endeavor itself and independent of whoever the designer of those designs may be. They only object on the scale of biology itself and on the collection of physics constants in hand.

In a very sneaky way, they say it’s a sneaky way to push creationism into science. They say this because they cannot let any “divine foot in the door”, as one Darwinian biologist said in a moment of candor. Many of them may not even be aware of this, having been conditioned to see things the way they say outwardly. There was a time when I did similar things in theistic topics.

And yet they have no problem with the ones that say aliens designed us. (See Michael Crichton’s essay, “Aliens Cause Global Warming”.

Creation deniers have a new religion, although they won’t acknowledge it. They themselves incorporate pagan mysticism into their beliefs. This is why Hindus sometimes see hints of their own origins theology in the Big Bang and theories like the “holistic universe”. Darwinian evolution, which in essence says all life has its origins in rocks and water and sunlight, is an ancient pagan superstition:
….

Saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth: for they have turned their back unto me, and not their face: but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us. – Jeremiah 2:27

….
Some ancient Greeks even abbreviated the Darwinian idea in writings that survive to this day.

An irony: those writings were preserved by Christian monks throughout these centuries. This love for literacy is a heritage left us through St. Patrick who taught literacy and left a love for the written word to his Irish disciples and their disciples, and through Charlemagne’s use of the Irish and British monks, to us today.

Christians, libertarians, gay marriage, who wants big government?

I am a very vocal Bible-believing Christian, and I got to tell you, that Christian libertarians are now in very great numbers, and the numbers are growing by leaps and bounds, as they realize that it is this approach to society that is the only view that anyone can say with certainty that God actually endorsed.

We have no king but JESUS!

Like God told Samuel, when the people demanded a government, a king, “They have rejected ME!” Because they didn’t want GOD to rule over them.

And Samuel warned them with the same warnings conservatives used to repeat in this country: The king will take your sons off to war, he will take your daughters off to his palaces to cook their delights, he will build his palaces with the burdensome taxes that will be to your grief. Needless to say, God’s warnings against government were validated with only the third king in Israel, because Solomon did all these things when he strayed from God’s wisdom. The result was a divided kingdom after his passing.

Even then, they said they wanted it because Samuel’s children were corrupt, after he appointed them judges, meaning they also wanted a king to protect them from abuse by their neighbors. BUT that means they themselves were already so corrupt they could not see that there was no obligation to follow those corrupt appointees. The laws of Moses are very clear, and there is NOT ONE reference or mention to ANY kind of government there. That’s how the custom of judges arose, they were spontaneous callings of God to the farmers like Gideon who raised armies to expel invaders who did impose kingships on them. Then they beat their swords back into plows and farmed again. And sometimes the people went to those judges to mediate disputes and for guidance later on….

In fact, the laws of Moses not only makes no provision for government of any kind, except the individual’s governing of himself and what is his, the Ten Commandments condemn it explicitly.

If somebody takes your property without your explicit permission, that’s THEFT. That’s why taxation is pure THEFT. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.

Romans 13 was very specific and the reasons given for respecting secular authority was contextual and conditional. The Romans actually kept the high priests in check, and God anointed them to both protect the Messiah from the persecutors and to expand the early reach and the future of the Gospel.

The “libertarians” that promote government intervention in things like marriage are just as clueless as Christians who look to government instead of God for a marriage certificate!

Remember the presidential debates, when they asked the question about “gay marriage”, the born-again Baptist who said EVERYTHING he did was from his Christian faith, Ron Paul, said the government should get out of it and leave it to churches like it was before. And the not-so-Christian Gary Johnson actually said the same thing!

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Ask yourself: what in the entire world did Caesar have that did not come from conquering by THEFT and spoils of the wars of lust that James spoke of?

Matthew 17 tells you what Jesus thought of tribute to Caesar.

He said we pay taxes so as not to offend them, in other words, so they’ll leave us alone.