If Rights do not derive from the Deity, do they derive from Nature?

[untermensche]

All men are created equal.

This is discernible?

It is possible that Thomas Jefferson would have regarded your not discerning it as evidence against your being a reasonable person.

Nice dodge. Yes I guess we will wait for Jefferson to come back and scold me.

There are no rights. There is only power.

So when you said we would all be better off if the government supported the rights of unions with more vigor, what the heck were you talking about?

The rights I want unions to have of course.

When you said we have a minority trying to take away things like the right to have an abortion and the right of homosexuals to marry, what the heck were you talking about?

Again, I do not see your difficulty.

I want these people to have these rights so I want the power structure to establish and protect them.

I do not believe that any right just exist as some floating spirit. Something is a right if sufficient power recognizes and protects that right.

 

[George S]

Something is a right if sufficient power recognizes and protects that right.

Rinse, lather, and repeat.

Rinse: if sufficient power protects X then X is a right

Lather: Sufficient Power = Might

Repeat: Might makes X a right by protecting it.

Hence: Might makes rights.

Something is a right if sufficient power recognizes and protects that right.

 

[Duke Leto]

No, they arise from being the opposite of Lefts.

 

[Speakpigeon]

You realise that 'rights' is largely an american concept, and is far less popular in the rest of the world? The idea of the basic necessities of life being a fundamental 'right' to be asserted in the face of one's fellow planet-dwellers, an a priori statement which brokes no contradiction, is far from obvious, or universal.

From Wikipedia:

John Locke discussed "life, liberty, and estate" as being "natural rights" (around 1679);
The English Bill of Rights (1689);
The Virginia Declaration of Rights (United States Declaration of Independence) 1776;
The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789);
The Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution (1791).​

Plus a few Spanish clerics prior to all of that.

Don't tell the French that human rights is essentially an American concept, they would be offended.

Largely US, yes, just as it is largely British and largely French. I would say more generally that it was fleshed out mostly by some of the Enlightenment's thinkers, most of them European, not American.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Does the OP question have a true answer, and if so, how does one find out what it is?

Yeah, it's a Human Right to know the answer.
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Yeah, it's a Human Right to know the answer.
EB

Do humans who want to know the answer have enough power to sustain getting the answer?*

*

Something is a right if sufficient power recognizes and protects that right.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Speaking from nature itself? There are no rights. There is no good or bad. There is only empathy and social contract, which we use to construct these things in our minds.