"To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures; and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appears to a common understanding altogether irreconcilable. Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature....Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind."
- Alexander Hamilton (The Farmer Refuted, 1775)
Without that "eternal and immutable law", there is no basis for "natural rights", which follow only from that transcendent point of view. Man, without that view, is only an advanced animal, and his rights are an animals rights. In other words, whatever he can claw, bite, and take from those around him is that to which he is entitled.
There are no "rights" in the animal kingdom but domination and submission, excepting the occasional accommodation between those of nearly equal power. One, who by reason of whatever power (physical, mental, political) he or she can exercise, can wrest whatever supposed rights they may from us, and moreover, are completely justified.
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