[David E]

Strangler, I enjoyed reading your post. With regard to your examples of Hillel and the Constitution (which I also hold in high esteem), it seems to me that you are going out of your way to extract the God part and leave everything else. (Maybe you are not personally adverse to it, but you are doing it to respond to my arguments to test if God is necessary to them, which I hope is the case). Whether or not these depend on God for validity, it just happens to be historically true. Picasso’s sketches were criticized by those who said that an eight year old child could have drawn them. His response was: “Maybe, but the eight year old didn’t.” I am trying to build my case on results, not theory.

But now that you bring them up, it seems that God is rather integral to them:

Hillel didn’t attribute the golden rule to himself, but rather the God of Abraham and the introduction of monotheism to the world. And the founding fathers did not say that Washington or Madison were conferring rights on those they governed; they had the vision that they themselves were blessed by that same God and they wanted to affirm that for everyone. (An earlier version of the US Seal they designed depicted Moses leading the Jews to Freedom, and the Liberty Bell in Philly has an inscription from the Torah on it). I’m not sure if the idea of specific rights can even exist without someone conferring them to someone else – can molecules or matter or give us rights?