Just because people fall short of their own mark does not mean their mark is wrong or that they don't believe in it, and this is true even of monstrous hypocrites, and that means it's true of most of us.


The first principle is life. Arrive at the sanctity of life as you will, and apply it as you see fit. The second principle is liberty, because a being as full of endless possibility as a human needs to be free in order for their life to have meaning. Property rights, "the pursuit of happiness", deals with the blunt fact that we are in a material world and our manifestation (you might even say substance) is material. Thus, we rely on having some claim to material resources. (The concept of collectivism as a valid and viable conveyance of property rights is a topic unto itself; but for the sake of this exchange, let us consider collectivism to be a valid form of property right allocation and indeed a tacit acknowledgment of the principle of property rights. A collectivist might say that a bum without health care is suffering a violation of his property rights.) Liberty requires property rights, because the material dimension (or substance in your opinion) of ourselves cannot express liberty except through those elements of space and time to which we are chained. Liberty also requires life, because you aren't free if you're dead. Well, maybe you are free if you're dead, but it's a moot point when discussing legal principles. You can be alive and have access to stuff and yet not be free; but you can't be free without being alive and having access to stuff.


You will notice that the sanctity of life is a "given". I can't make any logical argument for life being sacred on purely material terms. The closest I've got is, do you consider your own life to be sacred, or at least more your own than anyone else's? If so, why don't everyone else's lives have that same sanctity? This falls apart, because there are plenty who have sincerely believed that nobody's life is their own. So, as best I can reckon, the sanctity of life must be a "given" unless we invoke the spiritual realm.


There's your natural rights, phrased as "secularly" as I can without being dishonest.


Moving on to God:

As to the role of God, so long as you prod at the ludicrous pageantry of how different are people's ideas of God or how hard it is to square the idea of God with what you see in the world, you will think you are overlooking the valley from atop a high mountain, but you will be wrong. God is closest to the inner, not the outer. As an inner substance, there are many apt analogies for the absurdity of God-- the absurdity of love, the absurdity of time, or the absurdity of consciousness. With any of these inner elements, even if we all agree they exist as substance, we will have very different ideas about them, and we will disagree passionately about those ideas. We will observe things that don't make sense if such things as love, time, or consciousness really exist. We will observe ourselves behaving as though we have no love or consciousness, nor as if we believe in time. We will see quantum and cosmic phenomena that defy space and time. We will see people act like mindless sheep despite having minds. We will see that despite having love, we hurt the ones we love the most, and we can help anyone except the one we really love (to borrow from Townshend).


All this is to say: You cannot rely on people's ideas or actions, or even the comfort of observable data, to uphold the existence of immaterial substances.


 

After doing some housecleaning on a personal matter, a YouTube whale named "Thunderf00t" actually does a damn good job of explaining secular morality.




I have nothing against life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or even private property, per se. All of these things, and much else besides, can be justified as positive rights. My secondary point was to again point out the incredibly flawed nature of the Founding Fathers. My main point was that as people cannot define Outer God or Inner God, we have to drop God from any discussion of such vital issues as the role of government and the space between the State, Society, and the Individual.






 

Yes, but he's going from a biological predisposition towards a nurturing feeling to a rational plan of action not based on any feeling. For instance, he proposes only actions that could increase society's standard of living (a dangerous proposition that could allow for genocide of the mentally and physically disabled, aggressive taxation, mandatory abortions for underage and low income mothers, and a whole slew of other such social planning). However, he has moved from instinctive compulsions some of which serve society (and some of which do not) to his own place above emotions and using his reason to decide the good... but in doing so, he is (fortunately) not defining the good as "what feels right to members of our species on a moment by moment basis". Thereby, he defeats his own argument. I also think his argument is disingenuous because practically everyone except for hippies and anarchists would agree that something feeling right does not make it right, and morality only comes into play when something that feels strongly right so happens to be strongly wrong. Another thing, his example of warfare is not as challenging as he thinks if you are willing to accept that most of military history and tradition is grossly dishonorable. Finally, when there's two families and only enough resources for one, morality does not become irrelevant. You could draw straws. If one party is willing to take by force, the highest moralists would simply suggest you let them. It may be that the world was once populated by wiser more advanced humans (which I would claim as a fact), but I think the opposite is true of what that video claims, I think morality does not promote the welfare or survival of the individual or species.


 

On more: As to the Declaration of Independence asserting that our Creator endows us with inalienable rights, I think what they mean is this, while we might quibble as the who, what, and how of the Creator, it still seemed pretty obvious to all of them that we've at least got a Creator.