janus :

Was that road or street you walk down each day build by you or your buddies or the goverment? If you did, good for you.  If not, love it or leave it.

Brigand : You're giving me a choice as if I had one. Governments have monopolized utilites that were perfectly (or at least, better-provided) provided by the private sector. I now live in Washington, D.C., a.k.a potholes'r'us. NO private road would ever disintegrate in that manner

janus :

You would think? Mine roads are fine and I live in also in the capitol of of my country since it is public sectors job to keep them that way.

Txgangsta : Rights are (for lack of a better word) God-given, i.e. they existed before modern societies came to be. It took a long time to realize their existence, but now that we do see them they won't go down without a fight especially in the U.S. Besides rights are in everyone's advantage: the philosophy of the Enlightenment is what allowed us to get outside the vicious Malthusian circle on perpetual poverty.

Like Objectivists (I'm not one; I just appreciate some of their ideas) I believe in objective moralities, i.e. one that preserves life rather than sacrificing it. And individual rights is the best promoter of life found so far.

As a libertarian, I see that government's only purpose is to defend those rights. Yes, it might come up one day and "temporarily" suspend those rights as happened too often in the past. However, I'm still confident that reason will ultimately prevail and that government will back down.

But as a "philosophical anarchist" - I see borders as a completely arbitrary concept - I believe that individuals are the ultimate defenders of their rights. Whenever the non-aggression principle is broken (when someone initiates violence on you) it is YOUR duty to defend yourself since the police is mostly used as a defender of the law (however unjust it is, RE: War on Drugs) rather than of the people. I'm not ready yet to advocate for the abolition of ALL government, but I'm certainly for its shrinking so it can be flushed down the toilet if need be. After all, the more laws the more crimes are created.

Brigand : Then maybe you need to go outside Capitol Hill or your cozy suburban house and come where the "real" people live. Florida, New York and Rhode Island Avenues, just to name those, are so full of potholes that I need to ride more than half my trip to spare me from another pilonidal. And I'm not even talking about the alphabetical streets in the northern quadrant...

janus :

I don't think God has given us even the right to life. My God authorizes governments to kill. Free speech? If that was a God given right God wouldn't allow a person to be born mute. God doesn't give any of the things we usually call rights. If he did, he would come down and enforce the rights that he gave.

There is one right I do think God gave, and the reason he doesn't have to come down and defend it is because it cannot be taken. God gave us the right to pursue our own ends. What I mean by that is complicated philosophy, but it can be boiled down to a common phrase, "pursuit of happiness". However, this doesn't mean you don't have to deal with the consequences of the ends you pursue. It doesn't mean you'll actually find fulfillment. It doesn't promise anything derivative.

Yet, even with this God given right, I think this right isn't absolute. Your right to pursue your own end ceases at death. It might cease before you're actually dead because of disease. It has no warranty.

Welcome to the world. It's not pretty.

Txgangsta : I know the world is not pretty; I'm not a utopist who believes that reason will suddenly illuminate everyone at once and that all our problems will be solved. This is exactly what caused the downfall of classical liberalism and the resurgence of collectivist ideas like communism and fascism.

Also, your concept of the pursuit of happiness is my idea said otherwise. I defend everyone's right to live as they see fit as long as they don't hinder on others' pursuit of their own happiness.

"However, this doesn't mean you don't have to deal with the consequences of the ends you pursue"

Of course. I'm also a strong advocate of responsibility. If one chooses to skip school and do drugs, then one is very likely to suffer the long-term consequences of these actions. Likewise, if one finds out (like I did) that the chosen path is not the "right one", then it will require a long re-orientation.
However we have to be careful with responsibility. Some people (especially racial "minorities") are victims of profiling and are more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts for (arbitrary) crimes like drug possession as shown by many studies. This basically annihilates their chances of a normal life, but also their children's since they will likely grow poor and live in the endless circle of poverty.

Finally the image you give of your God (if ever you are serious about it) is one of the many reasons why I stop believe he/she/it exists. He/she/it is (most probably) an invention of humans to explain the unexplainable. The realm of God shrank as human progress went up, and this progress includes the concept of rights.

Yes, "rights" as such don't exist in Nature where the survival of the fittest is the rule. The can only exist through the use of reason.

And that's exactly why human wellness has improved so much in the past 260 years. Thanks to the realization that our neighbor is a potential ally rather than an enemy, we were finally able to cooperate together and build things that would be impossible to create on our own. Penn and Teller said that exact thing in one of their Bull* episodes: We hate each other's guts but were we to kill one another we would be dirt poor

janus :

I also like to emphasize that choosing to skip school and do drugs doesn't just mean you'll live in a small world with little opportunity. You may be thrown in jail. If I choose to protest against abortion, I might have to suffer the consequence of getting spit on and called a womanizer. The right to choose doesn't exempt me from all consequences: government, social, or otherwise. The right to pursue my own end doesn't mean I should be tolerated in that pursuit.

Also, if you don't believe in God because he/she/it is likely a human invention, shouldn't you deny the existence of rights because they also are a human invention? Just doesn't seem consistent. I'm a theist and still don't think that rights (most of them) are real. I'll say they're simply promised by the government, which is a human construction. 

Txgangsta : I see what you mean but I don't find my ideas inconsistent.

I say that God should be rejected because most ideas associated to God are destructive to humanity (genocide, infanticide) or downright oppressive (rape).  Human reason, once it puts one's self-interest first as long as it doesn't use others as sacrificial lambs, is what should direct humanity. They are not promised by governments; governments were created to protect those rights - also known as spontaneous order.

For the rest, we pretty much agree in the action-reaction of human action.

janus :

Ok, your denial of the existence of a god isn't inconsistent with your view on rights. But I have another question about inconsistency.

Self-interest seems contradictory to rights. You say that rational self-interest is what should direct humanity, but self-interest and the rights of others seems incompatible. If self-interest truly directs an individual, rights of others become contingent upon the individual's interest.

So, the problem I see is that other's rights only exist in so far that they benefit me (because rights of others come from self-interest). But that is totally contrary to the notion of a right. How would you explain the contradiction?

 Sword legion : You don't need to be religious to have morals. This is evident as humans have things like empathy. Also the bible (for example) contains lots of morally questionable things that I doubt many people would actually think to implement today. Not to mention there is a lot of things that the religious writings haven't addressed but that we still deem immoral.

There are lots of people who are non religious in today's society yet you don't see all of these people going around killing others. And as history has shown us typically extremists of different religions tends to be those who seem to have the most questionable morals.

I'd be kind of worried if the only reason religious people aren't going around killing people is because they hope to gain some kind of reward after death, if that's the case (though I in no way believe it is) then you could even argue non religious people are more moral.

So without religion, the majority of people can still agree on certain things that are right and wrong factoring in things like empathy, logical thinking and science like the right to be able to express your own opinion for example.

Txgangsta : They are actually pretty compatible.



Taking my point of view that religion is entirely human-made, then you realize that it shows humans for their best (thou shalt not kill, love thy neighbor) and their worst (massacres, genocides, rape, slavery, etc.) And so the Golden Rule just shows how others' right to free speech and free exercise of religion are compatible with YOUR rights: you want that on yourself too.



In other words, you will think twice before you want someone to be censored/restrained in his rights that don't interfere with yours.

And thank you Zlinqx for better-expressing what I meant. As someone once said: only religion can make a good person do bad things.

janus :

But I don't believe in my right to free speech or practice of religion. I have no problem with censorship of speech or religion. The golden rule doesn't force me to tolerate because I don't think all positions are tolerable.

I look beyond my self-interest. If I'm wrong, I would hope that someone would censor me.

Txgangsta : Then your attitude is rather self-destructive. Once you agree to the censorship of one thing, then you're going down a VERY slippery slope that you can hardly escape from. Just look in real life: the Bill of Rights has been torn to shreds, and whatever is left is still in danger. Fortunately, people are waking up and courts CAN wake up to their duties to defend the constitution

Also - I don't know about you - censorship is a legal concept; it means that government/the authorities keep someone from expressing ideas. Free speech does NOT mean you are entitled to a microphone.

Furthermore, how can you know you are "wrong" (however you mean it) if you can't express it? Besides, I believe that free speech is the best way to actually weed out bad ideas like racism, sexism and other forms of collectivism that lumps people together and makes people believe that they ALL act the same.

Finally, while I nominally agree that some positions are intolerable (see previous paragraph), I disagree that government should censor them unless they put someone's life or property in danger. There is a narrative around defamation, but I won't get into that since I'm not a legal expert.

janus :

I don't have a problem with self-destructive. I'm not the only thing that matters. I place value in things objective to myself, such as truth.

By "wrong", I don't necessarily mean moral (although it some circumstances I do). If my truth claims are not true, but false, I would rather be censored. So if Christianity is false, I would rather be censored than allowed free speech. This is because I value truth over and above my right to speech. 

However, most things are not severe enough to truly deserve censorship. Flatworld society, Westboro Baptist, etc, could probably use a kick in the rear, but even they don't need government censorship.

But if I were a leader of a small community, I might not allow Flatworld, Westboro, or other fallacious organizations to meet in my area. The censorship wouldn't happen on a government level, they would be driven out of town by the locals.

Txgangsta : Being driven away by locals, as you say, is not censorship: it's markets. Just like this Indiana pizza place that caused such an outrage by turning away a gay couple, markets usually abhor such attitude.

And why do you so want "false" ideas to be censored? In the case of religion (any of them) the claims are so extraordinary that it's impossible to tell whether they are true or not. Besides, censoring ideas will not make people realize that their ideas are wrong. Except for Southern Baptists, most reasonable people will realize by themselves that Evolution is the most likely thing that happened rather than Creation, so the latter idea will eventually die off by itself. We didn't need censorship to have alchemy die off.

Okay for starters the pilgrims and the revolutionist where very different people.the most notable revolutionist are George Washington,John Adams,Thomas Jefferson, all of the above put it pretty clearly in their letters to each other they thought your bible 'needed to be got rid of' thats their own words in letters to each other and other members of the masonic lodges.they shared a common belief that all religions are just different paths to 'god'.but all showed the least favor for your bible when compared to natures laws or virtually any other holy book.

lets point at jefferson for a moment...he says the rubbish in the bible is as easily separable as a diamond in a dung hill from the writing of his biographers he even wrote his own book called the morals of the jesus of nazerath which was later called the jefferson bible.which removed most of teachings of your bible and left only those parts of a great mind and removed those of an inferior mind.and if you go on to further read his writings he mocks most of your  bible repeatedly and especially including the supernatural parts..he like the others i mentioned where deist and masons this is easily provable just through reading their own writings,

George Washington wrote a letter to his nephew telling him to be weary of the bible and use reason when reading it.reason would eliminate all supernatural parts instantly.illegitimate birth,miracles and the resurrection would all be removed by reason.he even went on to bash these aspects himself.

G.W, J,Q.A, T.J all referred to god as G.A.O.T.U'great architect of the universe' in their writings which was the masons way of saying god as they did not adopt just any 1 god theory.

might i suggest watching this? i have verified all records in this movie personally by obtaining copies from the library of congress and some other sources such as decedents of these men which i still have in my file cabinet to this day just for religious people who try to lay claim to these men.

the founders where the revolutionist not the pilgrims for the pilgrims lived under british law the revolutionist made this the united states of america a sovereign nation which they declared secular.

The secular movements core value was to question gods and god theories and not believe in any of them without due process of irrefutable evidence.as it was one of the first agnostic movements that branched off atheism.only difference between secular/agnostic and atheism is atheist dont believe there is a god at all but agnostics claim there is a god but not one who has ever been written about by man.

{youtube} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU24fJ4NQxo {/youtube}

ps...John Adams was proven to be a member of the 'hell fire club'

deadric8 : The Pilgrims nevertheless (and ultimately) lead to the philosophy of the Enlightenment that lead to the War of Independence. Being so far away from home meant that they had some leeway in their actions. It took a while but by the end of the French and Indian War they felt that all those taxes were abusive.

You seem to define agnosticism wrong; these people (I am one) simply say that it's impossible to say whether god exists or not. You gave the definition of a deist, which the Founding Fathers were: they believed in God but it didn't influence their lives that much.

Txgangsta : Censoring another persons opinion simply because it is deemed by most as false doesn't really help anyone. It only makes it seem like you can't properly argue about why it is false. If an opinion is so wrong that it needs to be censored logically it shouldn't really be hard to make an argument stating what makes that opinion so wrong and that would also most likely be a lot more effective in convincing other people that something is wrong instead of just censoring it, seeing as  how if it's censored people will still have that opinion but they wont be able to express it. Not to mention how it would violate freedom of speech, not being able to express your own opinion freely.

Like janus said unless it puts a person in danger like if you're just attacking a person and making threats an opinion no matter how false it may seem shouldn't be censored instead it's better to adress it. I'd rather want someone I completely disagree with be able to speak their mind and then be able to tell them why I disagree with them and try to get them to understand why instead of them never being able to express their opinion in the first place.

janus :

You and I have very different definitions of censorship. I think we're in more agreement than not.

Txgangsta : Are we? In an tread unrelated to rights and censorship, you said you like bigger governments, which I don't.

However, it does seem that our back-and-forth exchanges stem from our definition of censorship. I only see it as coming from governments, which can stop someone from peacefully talking/writing/thinking. 

In other words, private citizens do not censor someone as long as they don't kill/hurt them to stop them from talking. I believe THIS is your definition of censorship and I agree with it 100 percent. I do it every day by blocking trolls on Facebook and Twitter so I don't waste time with them.