The phrase “God given rights,” and the claim and belief that “rights come and came from God,” is not only false, clearly a delusion, but absurd, contradictory in regard to a plethora of disparate Gods, and inconceivable and inexplicable as to how this was and is objectively and pragmatically realized.
Explain how this is possible, how this occurs and how it occurred initially, when humans first existed, and is and was realized, concretely and specifically, in politics and under the laws of all the nations that now exist or have existed and will exist in the future.
Rights aren’t “God given,” obviously, since God doesn’t exist. But even if one assumes, purely for the sake of argument, that God exists, and that rights are “God given” and “come from God,” the question is what God, from what God came and come these “God given” rights?
As Christopher Hitchens noted in his debates with Christians, humans have existed for at least 100,000 years and possibly as long as 250,000 years -the exact number of years is irrelevant- and there are and have been over a 1000 known Gods. And who knows how many Gods were invented and believed in by tribes and societies in prehistory? Hundreds, thousands, myriads?
Christians believe that rights come from the Christian God, whom no one knew existed until he sent his one and only son to earth in the person of Jesus only 2022 years ago. Muslims believe that rights come from the Islamic God, whom no one knew existed until the 7th century. And so forth.
If rights come and came from God, the one and only God, whether Christian, Islamic, or whatever, and not from humans, if rights were “God given,” not created and enacted by humans, then all the world’s people, now 7-plus billion people of both sexes and all races on every continent and in almost 200 countries, would have the exact same rights. And all the people who’ve ever lived in every nation and culture that has ever existed would have had the exact same rights.
If the Christian God was/is the one true God, then all the people alive today and who’ve ever lived would have or would have had rights given to them by a God that not only doesn’t exist but which no one even knew existed until Jesus came to earth only 2022 years ago, and whom most people alive today don’t believe in since they’re atheists or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists or whatever. And so, too, with Islam and all other religions.
In regard to God, the Christian God, and the United States: every week, for 3 decades, on TV and radio, Sean Hannity opines that the United States is “the greatest country that God ever gave man.” Did God defeat the British in 1781 and write the Constituion and the Bill of Rights and so forth and much else in the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries, to this day, or manipulate and control events to insure such outcomes? And so on in the future, forever?
And why didn’t God choose to give all the peoples of the world nations as great as the United States, and why didn’t he do so long before 1781, thousands if not myriads of years before, at least since the creation of the first society that could be described as a “civilization?
To give but one, transformatively crucial, example: is God responsible for passing the 1965 Immigration Act, i.e, for manipulating and guiding most of the ruling-elites and governing-classes in enacting this law and subsequent laws and policies and decisions that has resulted in an invasion of tens of millions of legal and illegal aliens and their offspring that will soon transform the United States into a nonwhite-majority country? If God is so responsible, many would say culpable, is he/she/it to be praised or denouced, hailed or cursed, given the politics and ideology and worldview, morals and ideals and emotions, of U.S. citizens and the historic majority?
Do people like Hannity and tens of millions of others who believe that rights are “God given” ever think long and hard or at all before they espouse such nonsense and phantasmagoria, such grotesque, howling, psychotic nonsense, and risible and dizzying phantasmagoria?
Rights, obviously, are man-made, as God is man-made, which is why there have been over a thousand disparate Gods in recorded history, and who knows how many in prehistory, and why rights vary crucially and dramatically in hundreds of different nations and societies in the world today and during the long history and far longer prehistory of man-made societies, the diverse sundry tribes, cultures, nations, civilizations, and religions. and will do so in the future as long as humans exist.
Atheism Simplified 