It frightens me that you’re so dismissive of democracy and the rule of law. What is a “human right?” How do you ascertain what is and isn’t such a right? How does a judge decide something is a “human right” that justifies overriding democratically adopted law?
To me it seems like the concept of “human rights” is like the idea that there is “divine law” that overrides man-made law, which judges discover by looking into seeing stones. It doesn’t make sense, and is really just a way of imposing a particular quasi-religious worldview onto the democratic majority.
> really just a way of imposing a particular quasi-religious worldview onto the democratic majority.
That's a fun-house mirror perspective: Nowadays, what you think of as "the democratic majority" seems to want to impose its own explicitly-religious worldview(s) onto unwilling others.
I’m talking about the quasi-religious view that individuals have these God-given “rights” as against society, just waiting to be divined by judges (i.e. mullahs of secular humanism).
The fundamental unit of democracy is the polity, not the individual. Democracy is neutral as to religion—i.e. religious motivations are no different than all the other motivations the majority may have for any particular law.
> The fundamental unit of democracy is the polity, [...]
By polity, do you mean a Greek city state of at most a few thousand people? Or do you mean something the size of the Roman Republic (but not the provinces)? Or do you mean something the size of modern federal republic of India? Or do you mean individual Swiss Cantons? Or perhaps the European Union? Or individual political parties, as long as they elect their internal leadership democratically?
I'm not sure if there is a 'fundamental unit', but if you want to make an argument that the 'polity' is the fundamental unit, you at least need to say which level. So eg municipality, county, state, nation, supra-national institutions like EU or even the UN? And that's just for federal countries. There are also unitarian countries and probably lots of weird edge cases.
> The fundamental unit of democracy is the polity, not the individual. Democracy is neutral as to religion
The implication being, each of us must govern our life by whatever "the polity" decides — sounds pretty authoritarian.
> mullahs of secular humanism
Sounds like a victimhood complex: "We religious people are being persecuted, because we have voting control of the government in [some polity] but we're not being allowed to use that control to force everyone else in that polity to live by our (untestable) metaphysical beliefs — it's not fair!"
But more importantly: There are no "mullahs of secular humanism" who insist on telling everyone else how they must live. I'd wager that no secular humanist has ever told a man that he must marry another man, or (modulo the CCP's former one-child policy) a woman that she must abort her pregnancy.
On the contrary, it's the (soi-disant) "Christian" versions of mullahs who insist variously that no one can marry anyone of the same sex — or use IVF or birth control — or get divorced for no fault — etc. — on the ground that each of those things is (supposedly) against God's law as they perceive it.
They're the ones who insist on forcing a pregnant woman to carry her embryo or fetus to term on the ground that supposedly it's just as "human" in God's eyes as a born baby — according to their religion.
So let's not talk about mullahs of secular humanism — the mullahs are on the other side of that debate.
To me it seems like the concept of “human rights” is like the idea that there is “divine law” that overrides man-made law, which judges discover by looking into seeing stones. It doesn’t make sense, and is really just a way of imposing a particular quasi-religious worldview onto the democratic majority.