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The Myth of Human Rights according to Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming's book, The Normality of Everyday Life, claims that the theory of rights is a superstition. Fleming says, "Ask where rights come from, they will either refer to a mystical story such as the wondrous tale of the social contract, or following Calvin, they will dismiss all criticism by saying that everybody knows what rights are."

He says that if there is a convincing proof of the existence origin of rights that he had never heard of it, that rights one must conclude are to be taken on faith, and only by those who profess to have no religion.

The book says that there are two American spokesmen for rights: Thomas Paine versus Thomas Jefferson. The educated Jefferson traced the theory of natural rights through the struggle between a king and a parliament, and to the Magna Carta, and ultimately to the Anglo-Saxons who lived in freedom before the Norman Conquest. 

Whereas with the uneducated Thomas Paine, thought that we were free and invented imaginary societies as he pleased, the first man having possessed all his right passed down to us, subject to certain restrictions imposed from a good government.

Jefferson wanted to purify Christianity, and he even wrote his own Bible to show that Jesus' thought was purely rational morality. But this angered Paine, who described Christianity as the worst of religions.

Fleming shows the reason that Paine thought Christianity and Judaism were the worst was because they were opposed to the rights of man was because the Bible taught that God's right of authority was over man, and emphasis on man's dependence on God in the Book of Genesis, moreover the Tower of Babel narrative ended in the theory based on the myth of the social contract between men, which excluded God.

Jefferson was not willing to go to the extremes of Paine, so he, unlike Payne and the French Revolution said in the Declaration of Independence;

"All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among this are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The author seems to be saying that Jefferson's rights were endowed by a Creation myth while Paine's rights come from the social contract myth that was supposing that there was a state of nature and supposing that primitive man agreed to give up their liberty in exchange for a secure social order. And he asked how would such agreement be binding upon their descendants.




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