Natural Rights from a different perspective

Have you ever had one of those "golden moments" where something just clicks in your mind, and everything begins making obvious sense for the first time? Last week, I had such a moment. The concept of Natural Rights all came together for me. Throughout college I've been trained to be a scientist, not a philosopher, and I happened to stumble upon a way of understanding and explaining natural rights that made some sense to me. I was thinking about how the laws of physics can be described as "properties of matter," and it dawned on me - could natural rights be thought of as "properties of people?"

In its modern usage, the word "rights" connotes an authoritative relationship between two parties (regardless of the term's original meaning), where one "grants" or at least "recognizes" the rights of the other. This connotation has been the root of my incorrect thinking.

If you take rights to be nothing more than a property of a person (not to be confused with the person's property and property rights), or rather, an "attribute" of a rational, sentient intelligence, then the rest seems to fall into place nicely. Man, being rational, is capable of sustaining his life ("life"), is capable of making choices of how to act and think ("liberty"), and is capable of ownership ("property"). All people have these abilities.

From a computational/object-oriented paradigm:
A man (an object) whom we'll call "Sam" has identity, state, and behavior. His identity is himself, individual, one. His state is rational, sentient, self-aware. His behaviors include taking actions to sustain his life, making rational choices, and acquiring property, in addition to taking actions to defend his rights if they are ever threatened. The invariant of the system is that all men have these rights, which means that infringing on another's rights is nearly impossible to do without invoking that person to exercise and defend their rights. If a second man, "James," were to threaten the Sam's life, Sam is capable of defending himself, either physically or by some other means (firearms, hired thugs). If James were to threaten Sam's property, Sam again is capable of defending his property.

Coercion is the act of infringing upon another's rights to the point where they can no longer defend them, i.e. if James were to subdue and restrain Sam so that he could no longer defend himself, or if James were to shoot Sam in the back. This sucks for Sam and seems good for James in the short run, but in a dynamic system, it's likely that Susan, Joe, and Buck will hear about James' unreasonable and murderous tendencies, and will want to take precautionary measures to isolate the unreasonable (and therefore "inhuman," at least temporarily) James from their community until it appears he will no longer practice coercion.

I know this is very foggy and not at all rigorous - I'm by no means a logician. However, I think the implication of conceptualizing rights this way is important: it is very difficult for somebody to violate your rights without you surrendering them first.

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Categorizing Atheists

I had an idea the other day about atheism, and after some thought, I've come up with 4 types of atheists. (This is speculation only; pure mental masturbation).

1. Scientific Atheists - uphold science as the only method of obtaining truths about the world. Believe that the lack of empirical (non-testimonial) evidence is reason enough to not grant assent to the God-claim. Because their disbelief is largely based on the scientific method and statistical reasoning (God isn't impossible, just infinitesimally improbable), their rationale is very difficult to communicate to the religious layman. Richard Dawkins falls into this category.

2. Philosophical Atheists - reason and logic tells them that god is a logical impossibility. Additionally, philosopher-atheists tend to be better at using language than their scientific counterparts. These philosphers can usually make a good case against the religious layman, but when you get them in a room with a philosophical religionist (or apologetic), the conversation quickly spirals into a word game. I consider Bertrand Russell to be a philosophical atheist (although his extensive work in mathematics could place him in the previous category, his ability to use language makes this category more appropriate).

3. Formerly Religious Atheists - strict religious upbringing (Missouri Senate, many Catholics, strong anti-gay churches, etc.), often coupled with antagonistic relations with parents/family causes them to rebel in their adulthood, which takes the form of turning against God. Because their disbelief is just a tool of their angry revolt against their perceived victimizer (God or God through their parents), many of these atheists still feel an internal need for religion, and seem to be the most likely to return to religious belief later in life (as Universal Unitarians). Think Brian Warner (a.k.a. Marilyn Manson), activists, shock-value atheists.

4. Apathetic Atheists - people with no apparent reason for or against disbelief. Atheists of this type seem to have either grown up in atheistic or otherwise non-religious families, or religious belief simply was never able to take root in their minds. Similar to the religious layman, this is the atheistic layman. Frank Zappa is a good example.

Where does your humble author fall in this categorization scheme? I'd say a mix of 1 and 4.



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Thoughts about DC

I've been living here for about a month, and I have a few observations about Washington DC:

• The weather. It's terribly swampy here. The air feels thick, heavy, almost like your swimming through it. Forget about hair and makeup - it must be a quite a site, actually, to see a city's entire female population arrive at work in the morning with their hair mussed, dampened and pressed against their sweaty, make-up smeared faces. DC's fever finally broke this week, though, and we went from 95F on Monday to about 55F last night.
  
  
• The skyline. There aren't too many tall buildings here. It's actually quite nice, to walk to work in the morning and have a clear view of the Washington monument. It's a large city, but unlike New York or Chicago, you can see the sky from downtown. The tallest buildings are Marriotts.
  
  
• The traffic. Who in the world thought that traffic circles would be an efficient way to direct traffic?! Without a doubt, traffic circles are the worst conception in the entire history of city planning.
  
  
• The kids. Or the complete lack of them. There are a few small children, but I've only seen one teenager in my four weeks here. I think young people are rare enough in the middle of the city that I haven't been carded anywhere I've gone. If you've always wanted to live in a place without punk-teenagers, DC is the place for you.
  
  
• The local economy. Like a good little economist-in-training, I've thought a lot about this. I can't figure out how it works. I have a suspicion that DC's infrastructure - the Metro, the city workers, the free museums - is financed by federal (not local) tax dollars, though I haven't asked anybody. I just can't see how this city could sustain itself. The sales tax rate is lower than in Minnesota.
  
  Additionally, I can't determine what the big industry is here, aside from government, of course. A lecturer I saw my first week here warned that the only thing DC manufactures is power, and that people who are drawn to power tend to flock to this city like moths to a lamp (rather, two lamps - a blue light and a red one). I tend to agree with that. Not often in Minnesota have I overheard a group of people discussing politics in public, but you can't escape it here. I saw a sign in the window of one of the congressional office buildings. It was a stop sign that read "Stop Privatization." Vague, but I'll assume the person meant "-of social security and medicare," although they could have meant "-entirely" for all I know. Is there really a philosophical war going on between the social-engineering paternalistic left and the behavior-policing theocratic right? I miss the real world, the world where people do productive work.
  

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