I would wager that certain people of darker skin colour, say, two centuries ago, would argue with you that those rights are not “inalienable.”
Or serfs in the Middle Ages.
Or prisoners in any jail today.
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Because human rights abuses happen does not mean there are no inalienable human rights. That’s like saying theft is legal because it has happened. Get it together.
I’m not sure what that has to do with protecting individual religious individuals from this sort of discrimination that this article is talking about? The CRA has little to do with taxes and is more about institutions. Whether or not a mosque or synangogue (or another institution) pays taxes has little to do with the treatment of individuals and more to do with how institutions are treated in our country. The CRA has nothing to say about taxes (as far as I know).
But I’m glad we can at least agree on SOMETHING here! Know hope! 
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The (tangental) relation is equal protection under the law and how it seems to me that a disconnect exists between the idea of religion as a protected class due to historical disenfranchisement yet they enjoy more protection and less burden than the rest of us.
Or to put it another way, I’ve never heard the periodic table of elements or the laws of thermodynamics recited before the opening of a congressional session.
Institutions do… not necessarily individuals of that faith though. The tax break is connected to the institution, not to individuals. A Christian doesn’t get a tax break just for being a Christian, his church does. And it’s not the CRA which addresses that, it’s the tax code (which as we all know, needs a major overhauling anyway).
If religious institutions get tax breaks, it shouldn’t be just for existing, but for whatever services it provides for their communities. Run a soup kitchen or a battered women’s shelter (which doesn’t discriminate based on faith)? Get a tax break. Send people out to funerals to remind everyone that you think god hates gay people? No tax break.
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Maybe you have a different definition of “inalienable” than I do. For me, it means a thing cannot be taken away. Not “it would be an abuse of this person to do so,” but cannot, as in intrinsic.
An inalienable right to freedom cannot exist if slavery exists. An inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness cannot exist if torture exists. An inalienable right to breathe cannot exist if murder exists.
I will agree that those rights exist. Those rights exist in the countries that have ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those rights are guaranteed by law, not by nature.
And the rights listed there are contradictory to your point:
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
So, your customers have a right to manifest their religion through their observance, including the clothing and symbols they shall ornament themselves with, and they have a right to a social order in which this right is accepted by, say, storeowners.
If we are descended from the family of great apes, then the only rights that are intrinsic are the laws of nature, of the animal kingdom: Do what is necessary to survive, or die.
If humans get together and say that there should be more rights than that, then those rights are not intrinsic, they are socially created and enforced.
If the humans get together and create a nation where those rights are guaranteed by their Constitution, then those rights are not intrinsic, they are legally created and enforced.
If humans get together and say that the rights are granted by a supernatural force, then the rights are not intrinsic, they are divinely created and enforced.
For a right that is not enforced is no right at all.
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Let’s switch out some terms and see if this still makes sense.
The motorcycle club members don’t get a tax benefit. Only the club which they created and support gets the tax benefit. Therefore the members of the motorcycle club are not benefiting from tax breaks. Meanwhile, the car club does not get tax breaks and is expected to pay taxes like every other entity.
Sorry, it doesn’t add up IMO. They do benefit. Just not directly
I don’t mean to suggest the CRA provides these benefits but rather that they are provided.
Your life can be taken away but that does not mean you do not have a right to live.
Rights are not guaranteed by anything. They exist independently and by virtue of being human. Whether a given county or government chooses to respect those rights is an entirely separate issue from their legitimacy.
Yet you would deny the same rights to me as a shop owner? What about my belief in the harm and danger of religion. Why am I not afforded the same rights to freedom of thought and conscience? Why do people get to assault me by displaying symbols of hate and intolerance in my store and upsetting my like minded patrons?
I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t make sense to me that I would be forced to endure hate symbols in my store when I should have the freedom to decide they are unwelcome.
I am in no way preventing people from believing as they choose or having any freedom. I am simply denying them the use of my business to do so. They can choose to do what they want elsewhere. I perceive a direct threat of death and violence from the displaying of religious trinkets. After all, historically, my kind has been tortured and murdered for refusing to believe.
I think the argument about taxes are just irrelevant in the first place (to this discussion, not in general). It’s a different argument than people have the right to wear religious clothing, which is what we were debating, yeah?
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By virtue of being human, you say?
I hereby grant you the imaginary power to talk to anyone, at any point in history or prehistory, from the dawn of the species homo sapiens. That’s approximately 100 billion people.
After conducting an extensive, unbiased survey, how many of them would you say agree with you on exactly which rights they have “by virtue of being human?” 10%? 5%? 2%?
At what point did these rights spring into existence? Do all great apes have them, or just the hominid family? Just the homo genus? Just the homo sapiens species? Going the other way, if all great apes have them, do all primates? All mammals? All chordates? All animals? All life forms?
Where do these rights come from?
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We can call it that. I am happy to concede that point. Yet, I do see a connection between my position that religion does not need to be part of the CDA as it enjoys an already privileged status in this country denied to the rest of us and it is the CDA which allegedly asserts that symbols of hate must be accepted in my imaginary place of business even when I feel directly assaulted by such displays.
They are a condition of being human. This topic closes in a few hours so I won’t waste my time on your unproductive line of argument beyond this reply which contains a few answers to your question. You should know that there is no consensus but I agree with Donnelly. Much more information on the subject exists here. I hate to end with an appeal to authority but I think it may be necessary to familiarize yourself with the basic concept and origins of human rights before you and I can share a productive exchange.
The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights declares that human rights originate from “the inherent dignity of the human person.”
The very term “human rights” points to a source: humanity, human nature, being a person or human being. Legal rights have law as their source, contractual rights arise from contracts, and thus human rights have humanity or human nature as their source. - Donnelly
Each individual is morally an end in himself/herself and not a means to the ends of others. This means that individual rights are our defense against collectivism. - Jose Azel
If you don’t want to argue about where rights come from (I actually think it’s marvellously productive, because it gets right down to the question “What does it mean to be human?” which is often every pertinent to human rights issues like the one in the initial post), then I will just posit one more question. You don’t need to answer.
Your first statement implies a “right to live.”
Your quote from Donnelly implies that this right is based on “human nature.”
How can an intrinsic/inalienable right to live be based on human nature, if >90% of the humans that have ever lived have been “alienated” from that right?
Finally, since you don’t want to argue about the nature of rights, I’ll just explain my view outright:
Terry Pratchett wrote that “homo sapiens” (“wise man”) is a ridiculous name for us as a species. Far better is “pan narrans,” the “storytelling chimpanzee.” The only things that make us better than animals are the stories in which we tell ourselves we’re better than animals (and the crazy thing is, it’s working; it’s painfully slow, but it’s working, as we slowly raise ourselves to higher standards than those of animals).
I would say that our rights come from our stories, and as our stories change, so do our rights. Two centuries ago, a free man had a right to own slaves, and a slave had almost no rights at all. Eight centuries ago, your rights varied wildly depending on how closely you were related to the ruler of your country. Twenty centuries ago, your rights were whatever the Emperor said they were. Fifty years into the future, we may have new rights that would be unthinkable today.
Our DNA hasn’t changed much in those twenty centuries; our stories have. If rights were intrinsic to being human, you’d think they’d be locked into our DNA, unchanging, and we’d expect the same rights in any era. But if they’re not, then, well, we have two important questions to ask ourselves: What kind of stories do we want to tell about ourselves, and what stories do we want our children to tell about us when we’re gone?
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How do I make this clearer?? You have a right to live. If someone takes that away from you, they will be charged with the crime of murder. Why is murder a crime? Answer, because you have the right to live. Being alienated from a right does not mean the right is not inalienable. Inalienable only suggests that it is not acceptable to humanity to alienate someone from that right.
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Sir Terry was indeed one of our finest philosophers, wasn’t he?
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I always had the impression that the legal concept of murder was at least partly based on the right to kill, rather than the right to live. It’s just that the former right is restricted to individuals serving in the capacity of a role granted such power, such as military, police, or judicial executioner. Let’s not forget: U.S. federal code includes provisions under which the state can legally, deliberately kill its own citizens via some of these roles.
Still, I’d like to believe that murder is defined first and foremost as depriving another’s right to live because the alternative definition is way darker.
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Of course, many nations and peoples consider this practice to be barbaric and without merit or legitimacy. But consider a police shooting. The police are allowed to use deadly force. However, do to the victim of that shooting having the right to life, a grand jury will convene to decide if the shooting was unavoidable or necessary. Of course, we are so corrupt that it almost never goes further than that but the principle seems to be that the right to life exists and taking it away results in an inquiry by the courts. If the alternative were true, I’m not so sure it would play out that way. But then, I’m not sure how such a system would even work.
I agree that it’d be the sign of a healthy society if murder were defined in terms of the right to live. I hope that’s the case with the United States, since it would emphasize the brutality of the state’s current power to deprive an individual of that right.
Any legal definition of murder based on the affirmative right to kill just sounds…well, barbaric.
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Find me a dictionary with that definition of inalienable. Please.
I’ve searched OED, Webster, Wiktionary, and Google, and I can’t find any “should nots” or “must nots” or “will nots,” any “unacceptable” or “punishables” or “criminals.” Every definition I’ve seen says “cannot.” Something that cannot be taken, lost or given away.
In feudal Japan, a samurai could kill one of his own peasants without even a clear reason to do so; in pre-civil-war America, there was no penalty for working a slave to death; in Rome, people went to the Coliseum to watch their fellow men kill each other. The figures that I’ve seen estimate that a billion humans have been killed by other humans in one war or another.
We humans are fantastically good at killing each other whenever we have a good story to tell ourselves about why it’s necessary. I don’t see how not doing so is fundamentally human, just because in our current stories we tell ourselves that we find it distasteful.
Since you’ve decided to continue the debate, I must insist you answer the two questions I asked earlier:
- If you could do a survey of everyone who’s ever lived, how many of them would agree that humans intrinsically possess the same list of rights that you consider fundamental to humanity?
- How far back along the evolutionary tree do these rights go? At what point did these rights come into existence?
And, for a far simpler, Yes or No question:
3) Whether someone is homo sapiens or not is entirely determined by that person’s DNA. Are these inalienable rights written into our DNA?
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Our monkey brains sure latch on to those binary views don’t they? We also like the idea of permanence. Once a thing is a thing it always is that thing. Silly things we monkeys.
Language is not calculus nor should it be taught that way. Use is meaning as the old man said.
You’re continued pedantry aside, do you imagine that we (civilization) are now as we always have been? Or, do you accept that we have evolved socially and have learned that all life has value and should be respected? Do you discount the works of our philosophers and thinkers? Do you think those who fought and died to protect the freedoms of others were just playing games?
- not knowing that life has value does not mean it does not have value. i.e. don’t ask the ignorant important questions.
- to the beginning of humanity though those early people may have been unaware of it. Then again, murder has been taboo longer than recorded history so, perhaps our ancestors had a better grasp of what being human means than you.
- they stem from the intrinsic dignity of human kind.
The taboo of murder is not a recent invention as you are suggesting. If you truly think human rights don’t exist, that’s your prerogative. After all, reading what you have written is really starting to make me think you may be right and not all life is possessed with intrinsic value.
finally to your pedantic argument about the definition of inalienable. The RIGHT to life cannot be taken away. The RIGHT to self determination cannot be taken away. They are inalienable. Life can be taken away. Self determination can be taken away. The right to those exist despite the denial of the realization of those rights.
What does it mean to have a right you cannot enforce? I’m not sure such rights meaningfully exist.
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Why can’t you enforce them? Kill someone, go to jail. Take away their liberty (kidnapping) go to jail. It seems to me enforcement takes place every day. Now, if you are saying our rights don’t matter because someone can kill or kidnap you, I can’t get behind that. We put a lot of effort to ensure the rights of people are honored.
