I think you miss the significance of what I'm saying here:
You have every right that it is conceptually possible to have, you have the right to have a home of your own choosing provided to you, you have the right to have whatever food you prefer given to you, you have the right to have a sexual partner of your choosing, you have the right to kill people amd eat them.
You have the right to everything you could possibly have and do, every possible freedom or service that you could think of is your right.
The concept of rights came about mainly around the time of the magna carta, when the powe of kings was being limited, the nature of the restrictions gave rise to the concept of certain things that no one was permitted to do except under specific circumstances, the language used was that everyone had these things they were entitled to.
These were usually freedoms, but sometimes services such as being entitled to legal representation, which could not be denied to law abiding people, break the law, however, and some of your rights could become forfeit.
Laebreakers lose all kinds of freedoms guaranteed to them by their otherwise inalienable rights, You lose the freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of association, etc.
In addition, inalienable rights are subjected to arbitrary restrictions even when the people had been law abiding.
For example, freedom of speech is abridged in the cases of sharing classified info, incitement, and obscenity, certain gatherings could be denied or dispersed on particular and usually subjective and arbitrary grounds.
Freedom to own property is restricted by various taxation laws, by licensing laws, by intellectual property, by restrictions on what is considered legitimate ownable properties, and what are the acceptable requirements for this ownership such as in the cases of guns or gold or land.
There is also the matter that new rights are being made up on a constant basis, now people are saying internet access is a right, now people are saying Healthcare us a right, now people are saying access to countries amd employment are rights.
Everything is a right, the thing that makes a right is the enforcement of those rights.
What a right is, is the social contract that exists between government and their subjects, if the representitives of the government are seen to violate the rights of their subjects, then the subjects are no longer beholden to their end of the social contract.
God has no role here except as some impotent endorser of the arrangement in the background, symbolic role with no function, his endorsement is assumed by us, its not even given directly. God may in all actuality be in stark opposition to the concept of rights that we believe we should have, they are self evident in that they feel right to our common sense which we argue us God given, and therefore God endorses this idea.
When the contract fails to be upheld, God is not going to enact any sort of miraculous intervention on the behalf of rights, indeed, regimes that deny even the most universal of rights are allowed to exis for centuries as God idly stands by and merely watches,tge most he does is inspire peopleto fight for their entitlements, and even then these people have no guarantee of victory, in a lot of cases, they lose and have what remains of their rights seized away from them.
It is up to the people to enforce the terms of this agreement, and at their disposal they are given every freedom it is possible to have in order to ensure that the contract is either renewed or rewritten under a new government after the old one is overthrown, in that case, the terms are up to us and the new government's representatives to write out.
There is no mention of rights in any holy book, there are instead a set of laws and decrees, which are enforced to varying levels, never is there any indication of what laws a lawmaker could not pass into power. It seems the only restriction is in offending God by disobeying him.
Even then his concern is only with having a people who are absolutely devoted to him, and to worshipping him in the correct way, which naturally includes obeying his every command to the letter without question or hesitation.
His greatest concern has nothing to do with rights, but with his obsession with limiting the freedom of religion by violently ensuring that his people remain uncorrupted by other competing religious beliefs. So in one great sense, he repeatedly violates his inviolable rights that he supposedly gave to his people.
Did God change his mind in the NT? No, because it is stated that he never changes his mind, his nature and will are eternal, his commands remain the same regardless of the events which pass on earth, remember, he exists outside of time and space, so there is no way that he would act as a temporally restricted being would in responding to earthly matters, the death of christ was no surprise to one who has simultaneously seen the beginning and end of all things.
There are not two contracts for such a being, only one. Lastly God appoints all rulers to their position, not just those who believe in him and obey him, he explicitly has the hold of a Pharaoh's heart, and can bend his will as he wishes it to be bent, he explicitly states he has appointed the kings of the enemies of Isreal, who he commands to be slaughtered.
This means that Stalin was appointed by God, he ruled with God's consent and by God's will, this was true even as he was a man who did not believe in him or respect his authority. When he died and his regime fell, it was by God's design that it should happen then and as it did.
(post is archived)