Of course, she really doesn’t believe that it is a problem for people not to believe rights come from the State. If the state took away the right to abortion, for example, can you imagine how loud Heidi’s screeching would be that “the Government has no right to do that?” Would Heidi, at that point, suddenly become a Christian because she would be acting in a way as to demonstrate her belief that “rights come from something higher than the state.”
Now, keep in mind in all this that R2K agrees with Heidi that rights don’t come from God — at least not directly. R2K believes that all rights come from Natural Law. So, Heidi and David Van Drunen have in common that Christians should not be appealing directly to God but to some other agency for human “rights.” Heidi believes the appeal should be made to the State. David Van Drunen believes the appeal should be made to Natural Law.
Heidi is but echoing her ultimate ideological teacher, Thomas Hobbes, who bluntly taught, arguing from crudely materialistic premises, that ALL our rights, privileges, and social standards indeed come from the omnipotent Leviathan-state, without which there would be nothing but bestial chaos in the world, “Bellum omnium contra omnes”.
As Benjamin Wiker pointed out:
https://archive.org/details/worshippingstate0000wike/page/136/mode/2up?view=theater
“I think we can cut through a lot of tedious debate by noting that modern liberalism simply transfers to the individual the kind of absolute autocratic power Hobbes ascribes to the king. Thus liberalism today awards the individual the power to decide how to live free of the interference of the church or Christian morality (the very power Hobbes gave the sovereign). … Modern liberalism’s dispute with Hobbes is like a disagreement between a son and a father – it’s still the same family.”
Viisaus,
You’re a freaking genius. You have the whole history of ideas (Intellectual and social history) down better than anyone I’ve ever known. Far better than myself, and I am not able to say that to many people.
Thanks for contributing here, even when I don’t agree w/ you.
Bret
I will give glory to God for having guided me on this “genius” path: firstly, the prophecies of the Book of Daniel taught me that attention must be given to the Hellenistic era; for it was that time period when the ideology of Liberalism was first incubated with its prototypical formulations. The conquests of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar created that international Greco-Roman pagan civilization, or “enlightened paganism,” which was something quite different from the earlier, tribalistic/racialist, strictly exclusive and crudely superstitious pagan cultures that operated on a small, local scale.
http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/2010/11/2321.html
“Without the spread of oriental cults and without the Germanic invasions, Hellenistic civilization would have initiated, with Rome as its starting-point, the Americanization of the world.”
Secondly, the New Testament mentions (Acts 17:18) only two pagan schools of thought: Stoicism and Epicureanism. This was for me like a providential sign that I must learn more about these two schools, even though Platonism and Aristotelianism were and are more famous. The fact is, that even though Plato and Aristotle have “hogged all the attention” in conventional histories of thought, the latter-day disciples of Epicurus and Zeno have been busily working in the background. And sometimes “Number Twos” can have more actual influence than nominal “Number Ones.”
As J.P. Mahaffy, the British historian of antiquity, put it, writing in the late 19th century:
https://archive.org/stream/greeklifeandtho03mahagoog#page/n48/mode/2up
“Above all it should be insisted upon that the greatest inheritance the Greeks left in practical philosophy was not the splendour of Plato, or the vast erudition of Aristotle, but the systems of Zeno and Epicurus, and the scepticism of Pyrrho. In the Roman Empire Platonists and Aristotelians were scarce; Stoics and Epicureans occupied all society. And if in the Middle Ages the schoolmen returned to the great classical masters, in our own day the world has again fallen into modern paths, and every thinking man is either a Stoic, an Epicurean, or a Sceptic. These eternal systems were born not in the golden but in the silver age of Greek literature.”
And it is in Epicureanism and Stoicism where the pagan roots of “Progressive” worldview can be found. Epicureanism provides the blueprint for atheistic, atomistic individualism (“individuum” was literally the Latin word for “atom”) while Stoicism provided the blueprint for pantheistic one-world collectivism.
Hobbes’s critics back in his day already understood very well that he was making the secular state boss, and the church its powerless puppet:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17388/17388-h/17388-h.htm#CHAPTER_V
“All really pious people called Hobbes an Atheist. Technically he was nothing of the sort, but it matters little what he was technically, since no plain man who can read can doubt that Hobbes’s enthronement of the State was the dethronement of God:
…
“When men have once swallowed this principle, that Mankind is free from all obligations antecedent to the laws of the Commonwealth, and that the Will of the Sovereign Power is the only measure of Good and Evil, they proceed suitably to its consequences to believe that no Religion can obtain the force of law till it is established as such by supreme authority, that the Holy Scriptures were not laws to any man till they were enjoyn’d by the Christian Magistrate, and that if the Sovereign Power would declare the Alcoran to be Canonical Scripture, it would be as much the Word of God as the Four Gospels. (See Hobbes, vol. iii. p. 366.)”