Guns As A " God-given Right"

[Era Might]

My apologies for breaking (or, rather, confirming) Godwin's law, but was the Nazi state a necessary development of modernity in '30s Germany?

Or Stalinism in Russia?

 

I may be completely misreading things, but it seems the subtext of your argument is that we must never oppose any expansion of state power because its inevitable.

 

Defeatist nihilism.

 

Yes, the Nazi state was built by the perfection of technique...especially political technique. Ellul actually was French and was active in the French resistance during the war, so he understood the 20th century very well. One of the points he brings up in his book is how Hitler, unlike Napoleon, was not a genius military mind...Hitler was so successful because he was a genius at political technique, and the Nazi state perfected techniques like propaganda, and later concentration camp. But Ellul's main point is that technique has nothing to do with Nazism or Communism or Capitalism. The same techniques that create concentration camps and gulags are used to create docile workers in America, to create mass consumer tastes and create a consumer society, to remake man's nature to adapt to industrial work, to adapt people to police oversight and military culture.

 

You can oppose anything you want. The point of Ellul's book is that we really have no way out of the predicament we have created...he simply analyzes the problem of technique, how it operates, what kind of power it creates, what kind of society it creates, and how it develops. You can "oppose the expansion of state power" but more likely than not this will just be a political exercise designed to use platitudes to mobilize people...and Ellul discusses how resistance is planned for in a technical society, it's a necessary technique to give people the illusion that they by getting involved in a cause they are doing something, because it keeps them satisfied.

 

As I said, political thinking has its uses, but those uses are mostly to translate big things into small actionable chunks. Don't confuse politics with the reality of things. Question your own assumptions, that's the only point, because believing that you are defending a cause (whether it's "the right to bear arms" or "worker's rights" or whatever) doesn't mean you aren't blindly playing along with the very things you think you are opposing.

[Era Might]

*Just to clarify, it's not that Nazism or Communism or Consumerism were "necessary" in the sense that another ideology could not have emerged...just that they all emerged at the same time because they were all products of technique, which had passed a watershed of development and was coming into its own in the 20s and 30s. One of the things that helped the United States win the war, besides its military technique, was its psychological technique and its ability to unify its citizens around its war aims, not just politically but socially, economically, etc.

Edited May 6, 2014 by Era Might

[Anomaly]

If there is no God, there are no rights in any transcendent sense, so the whole discussion becomes meaningless.
It all boils down to "might makes right" or the strength of the strong.

The State giveth, the State taketh away.

I'll assume you mean universally applicable in your use of transcendent.

What has a god have to do with universal rights? There would first have to be a transcendent knowledge of god. There isn't.
God hasn't swooped down and said: These are the human rights! This is what is defined as human. Etc, etc.

The shared knowledge and experiences of humanity, along with reason and logic, have worked to develop the societal understanding and functionality of human rights. You can be derisive and call it the State, or be lazy and small, and call it the State, but fundamentally the reality of rights are still going to be a societal construct. It's still going to be a cultural phenomenon enforced via cultural inertia.

Like it or not, nothing maintains power much beyond what the majority allows or permits. Apathy of the masses is just as powerful as the will of a few who choose to garner and wield power.

Its self defeating and dismissive of human nature to claim human rights can only be decreed and defined by a God.

[4588686]

I'll assume you mean universally applicable in your use of transcendent.

What has a god have to do with universal rights? There would first have to be a transcendent knowledge of god. There isn't.
God hasn't swooped down and said: These are the human rights! This is what is defined as human. Etc, etc.

The shared knowledge and experiences of humanity, along with reason and logic, have worked to develop the societal understanding and functionality of human rights. You can be derisive and call it the State, or be lazy and small, and call it the State, but fundamentally the reality of rights are still going to be a societal construct. It's still going to be a cultural phenomenon enforced via cultural inertia.

Like it or not, nothing maintains power much beyond what the majority allows or permits. Apathy of the masses is just as powerful as the will of a few who choose to garner and wield power.

Its self defeating and dismissive of human nature to claim human rights can only be decreed and defined by a God.

 

 

Yep.  Never trust the charlatan who comes selling a package of rights that he totes got from gawd.  

[4588686]

I wonder what exactly is contained in Socrates' invisible bag-o-rights.  Do atheists have a right to try to persuade Catholics to abandon their faith?  Do gay couples have a right to visit the local leather bar?  Are your neighbors allowed to partake in sodomy?  

Edited May 6, 2014 by Hasan

[4588686]

Somehow, I bet that the rights that God gave men conforms pretty closely to the preferences of a conservative straight white man who believes in a rigid brand of conservative American Catholicism.  How lucky for Socrates!

[Winchester]

Yep.  Never trust the charlatan who comes selling a package of rights that he totes got from gawd.  

This implies that there are charlatans one should trust.

[4588686]

This implies that there are charlatans one should trust.

Must be nice to be clever

[Vitamin]

Must be nice to be clever

 

This implies there is cleverness to be had.
 

[Socrates]

Yes, the Nazi state was built by the perfection of technique...especially political technique. Ellul actually was French and was active in the French resistance during the war, so he understood the 20th century very well. One of the points he brings up in his book is how Hitler, unlike Napoleon, was not a genius military mind...Hitler was so successful because he was a genius at political technique, and the Nazi state perfected techniques like propaganda, and later concentration camp. But Ellul's main point is that technique has nothing to do with Nazism or Communism or Capitalism. The same techniques that create concentration camps and gulags are used to create docile workers in America, to create mass consumer tastes and create a consumer society, to remake man's nature to adapt to industrial work, to adapt people to police oversight and military culture.

 

You can oppose anything you want. The point of Ellul's book is that we really have no way out of the predicament we have created...he simply analyzes the problem of technique, how it operates, what kind of power it creates, what kind of society it creates, and how it develops. You can "oppose the expansion of state power" but more likely than not this will just be a political exercise designed to use platitudes to mobilize people...and Ellul discusses how resistance is planned for in a technical society, it's a necessary technique to give people the illusion that they by getting involved in a cause they are doing something, because it keeps them satisfied.

 

As I said, political thinking has its uses, but those uses are mostly to translate big things into small actionable chunks. Don't confuse politics with the reality of things. Question your own assumptions, that's the only point, because believing that you are defending a cause (whether it's "the right to bear arms" or "worker's rights" or whatever) doesn't mean you aren't blindly playing along with the very things you think you are opposing.

 

I'm still not seeing any actual argument here, and you seem to avoid entirely the central of whether particular "techniques" of government control are right or wrong.

 

If you want to argue that opposing any particular expansion of state power is wrong, because we little people are all helpless against the power of the almighty state, and resistance if futile, then it is equally pointless to defend the "techniques" of the state such as "gun control."

[Socrates]

I'll assume you mean universally applicable in your use of transcendent.

What has a god have to do with universal rights? There would first have to be a transcendent knowledge of god. There isn't.
God hasn't swooped down and said: These are the human rights! This is what is defined as human. Etc, etc.

The shared knowledge and experiences of humanity, along with reason and logic, have worked to develop the societal understanding and functionality of human rights. You can be derisive and call it the State, or be lazy and small, and call it the State, but fundamentally the reality of rights are still going to be a societal construct. It's still going to be a cultural phenomenon enforced via cultural inertia.

Like it or not, nothing maintains power much beyond what the majority allows or permits. Apathy of the masses is just as powerful as the will of a few who choose to garner and wield power.

Its self defeating and dismissive of human nature to claim human rights can only be decreed and defined by a God.

 

When we say certain fundamental rights, such as the right to life (and its corollary, the right to defend it) are God-given (in the words of Jefferson, we are "endowed by the Creator" with inalienable rights), we mean that these rights are given by God and exist independent of whether the state or "society" chooses to recognize them or not.

 

For instance, persons have a right to life simply by virtue of being human beings created in God's image, not merely because the state or the majority grants that right.

 

While, yes, in practical terms, it is the state or majority society that determines whether or not these rights are legally recognized, belief in inalienable God-given human rights does make a difference with regards to moral reasoning.

 

For example, this distinction is core to the abortion debate.  Pro-lifers believe that all innocent human beings have the right to life simply because they are human beings, while atheists such as Peter Singer and others claim that the right to life should be decided by other persons based on extrinsic subjective factors - and that there is no intrinsic human right to life.  

 

If rights are created solely by man, then man just just as easily decide to take rights away.  We have no objective, transcendent standard by which to judge the actions of a state or "society" above the state or society itself.

 

Thus, if there are no rights above those granted by human authority, claiming the government in China (or whatever place) is engaging in "human rights violations" becomes meaningless.  The most we could say is that Chinese government/society does not give the same rights as Western government/society.  (Or we could say the same regarding what rights are and aren't granted by Nazi society, if you want to go there.)

 

Now before strawmen start getting pummeled, I'll clarify that my argument is not that atheists cannot believe in or recognize legitimate human rights or justice.  As a believer in natural law morality, i believe persons are born with some innate sense of justice (however imperfect).  But appealing to such justice is not logically consistent with materialist atheism.  Objective justice is not some material thing which can be observed in the lab or scientifically demonstrated.

[Socrates]

There are not rights in a transcendent sense.  That's correct.  Pretending that there's a god doesn't change that fact.  And no god has swooped down to hand any rights to anybody.  

 

Or we can pretend there's no God.  Since we're all nothing but blobs of protoplasm, or more accurately, the meaningless random collision of atoms, then all this other talk is meaningless.

 

But, yeah, you're an atheist, we get it.  We heard you the first time.

[Anomaly]

Or we can pretend there's no God. Since we're all nothing but blobs of protoplasm, or more accurately, the meaningless random collision of atoms, then all this other talk is meaningless.

But, yeah, you're an atheist, we get it. We heard you the first time.

Just as there are many philosophies in diests, there are many in atheists. Rationally, humans can observe and recognize humans and cognitive beings. It's only a small journey to recognize shared identity and self within community. It's just as ?, if not more so, powerful and convincing as thinking you identity is totally dependent on an intangible being arbitrarily willing you into existence. In fact t, God does nothing as an agent to codify, protect, or even establish human rights or dignity. In fact, atheists and diests both have to think and act within the constraints and possibilities of our human existence in the reality of here and now.

[PhuturePriest]

[Socrates]

Just as there are many philosophies in diests, there are many in atheists. Rationally, humans can observe and recognize humans and cognitive beings. It's only a small journey to recognize shared identity and self within community. It's just as ?, if not more so, powerful and convincing as thinking you identity is totally dependent on an intangible being arbitrarily willing you into existence. In fact t, God does nothing as an agent to codify, protect, or even establish human rights or dignity. In fact, atheists and diests both have to think and act within the constraints and possibilities of our human existence in the reality of here and now.

 

If atheistic materialism is true, then concepts such as "rights," and all other ethical or moral beliefs are nothing more than physical movements of atoms and electrons in the head.

 

Thus there is absolutely no objective standard to judge anyone of these sets of electro-physical motions more or less valid than any others.

If man alone is the ultimate authority in determining what human rights and "dignity" (whatever that means) must be respected, there is no higher authority to appeal to, nor to judge any others right or wrong.

Your concept of rights and ethics (nothing but electro-chemical brain activity) is then no better or worse, or more or less valid than mine, the Pope's, or Joseph Stalin's.

 

All in all, we're just bricks in the wall.