From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jan 13 2003 - 13:12:16 MST
--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin@tsoft.com> wrote:
> Ron writes
> > These men felt that their rights were from nature and nature's God.
>
> Was that a psychological necessity for them? If instead they
> had abandoned belief in natural rights and a Divine Approval,
> would they have been able to pull it off? (You see, I believe
> natural rights to be fictitious entities, and suppose instead
> that only legal rights actually exist, and that these exist
> only in a social contract---as Charles was saying.)
The enlightenment philosophers who followed the Lockean tradition (and
not that or Rousseau) were primarily deists, who while believing in a
creator god, felt that this entitity existed outside our deterministic
universe and was therefore powerless to affect or afflict it while it
was in operation.
This concept is little different from our own extropic concepts of
sysops and the U-prime, Omega Point theory and our principles of
spontaneous order. The idea we live in a simulation running on a
quantum computer in some higher level universe is merely a modern
rephrasing of the deist paradigm in a contemporary technological point
of view.
The deist view is essentially that Natural Law is Objective Truth,
embedded in the structure and function of the universe, and exhibited
in our daily lives by much more than gravity and relativistic effects,
but also biological evolution and the development of intelligence and
individualistic generalist organisms such as ourselves.
As such, there is not 'psychological necessity', Natural Law simply is.
It's truth is evidenced by the preeminent development of modern
technological societies such as the US, which is the closest physical
embodiment of the enlightenment values of Locke.
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