Today, we talk about the right you have to your own life, kind of a crazy thought.
But in half the world, the government doesn't believe you have a right to your own existence.
It's a big deal.
And that is next.
Hey, welcome back to the very fair show.
It's great to have you with us today.
And I'm sure hoping you're doing well.
You know, you have a right to your own existence, right?
I mean, you're not supposed to be arbitrarily executed, right?
You have a right to grow up and get married and have a family if you choose.
You can do what you feel is best for yourself, medically, socially and educationally.
Whatever you do with your life, you think you deserve assurance that the government
shouldn't hunt you down and take your life away from you, right?
I mean, you think that your right to life is so obvious, so fundamental that you don't
really think about it much.
You don't really have to think about it, right, or defend it, right?
Well, you can thank the founders of the United States for that.
It wasn't always the case.
And it still isn't in much of the world.
In the Declaration of Independence, the founders leveled their complaint against King George
III.
And he certainly was an easy target, a way to marshal angst.
The king's coercive acts, and yeah, that is actually what they called them, were also
an act of parliament.
In fact, the coercive acts of 1774 were almost unanimously supported by the members of the
British Parliament.
And that's what unified the colonies against Great Britain.
As bad as King George III was, he's actually not the worst king in history, not even close.
He was just the current king at the time, and he was the king that inspired their cry
for freedom in the new world.
The founders were well-versed in political history.
They knew many kings were guilty of severe human rights abuses, if not most.
And everyone knew about the severe abuses of King Henry VIII.
He lived from 1491 to 1547, and thank goodness he died, because he was really nasty.
For starters, he beheaded two of his six wives.
He was obese, subject to raging mood swings, and he ruled for 36 years.
According to historians, he executed 57,000 of his own people.
He was also paranoid, and that usually comes right along with heavy guilt.
He killed members of the clergy.
He killed ordinary citizens.
He killed nobles.
Anyone who had taken part in a protest was a potential suspect.
He killed Queen Anne, one of his wives, since she couldn't deliver him a male heir.
To pull that off, his advisor, Thomas Cromwell, concocted a wild infidelity scheme.
She was accused of being unfaithful to five men, including her brother.
None of that was true.
The reality is that these five men were just enemies of King Henry VIII.
So she, his wife who couldn't bear a son, was sentenced to death, and those other five enemies
of the king got their heads chopped off at the same time.
Very efficient.
King Henry even killed his closest advisors.
Though deeply trusted by the king, Sir Thomas More didn't want King Henry to break away
from the Catholic Church.
Henry had him killed for that opinion.
And that dastardly deed was orchestrated by an even more trusted advisor, Thomas Cromwell.
But can you believe it?
King Henry also killed Cromwell.
Cromwell was an English lawyer, the great-great-grand-uncle of Oliver Cromwell.
He was instrumental in arranging for Henry to get his divorce and marriage to his first
queen Anne.
So he was a very trusted guy.
But later when Henry got mad that Anne couldn't crank out a baby boy, he concocted another
Anne.
He concocted the story that would give Henry cover to kill her.
But by wife of four, Henry was so blazing mad about everything that he blamed Cromwell
for feeling embarrassed that he still didn't have a male heir.
Yep, it was Cromwell's fault that King Henry's fourth wife was bad at making boys.
So what did King Henry do to his most trusted advisor, the man who he could share his feelings
with and be protected and covered by this attorney?
So Henry sentenced his most trusted and capable advisor to death without a trial.
He was executed on Tower Hill in 1540 and his head was placed on a spike on London Bridge.
Now you'd think that'd make people shut up and most did tower in fear, but not Anne.
Askew. King Henry VIII killed her because she threatened his grip on power.
Anna Askew fought for women's rights, and she fought for the freedom of religion,
and she spoke out against male oppression, and she fought for the freedom to believe in God through Christ without the church's hierarchy.
Horrible crime. She hit a nerve. You didn't need a wicked, fat, arbitrary king to know God.
Everyone respected her bold and brave declarations. Henry hated her.
She was stretched out on the rack, and there's even a movie about her, and it's really grody.
I mean, it was painful. So she was tortured so brutally that her shoulders and her hips were pulled from their sockets.
Her elbows and knees were dislocated. Her screams were heard outside the White Tower.
She never recanted her beliefs. She was burned at the stake with some other heretics.
Fortunately, some people that liked her slipped her and some of those other guys some gunpowder so that when the fire burned,
she blew up, literally, so that she didn't have to suffer through this long, enduring fire.
So if people believed in something different than the king, that's what would happen, especially if they were effective at communicating it.
Henry killed monks for refusing to sign the oath of supremacy.
This was the document that meant you accepted the egomaniac Henry as the head of the English church.
They were tortured and left to starve to death in cells. Others were burned.
King Henry's rage was inflamed further as these monks remained calm and they wouldn't give King Henry the allegiance that he demanded.
They believed that only God deserved worship. So Henry elevated the torture, inventing even more cruel and unusual punishments.
For example, at the London Charterhouse, which today exists as Charterhouse Square, the monks were disemboweled while they were still alive.
After they died, they were beheaded and then they were quartered.
In other words, their body was hacked into four pieces.
Those executions took place from 1535 to 1537.
And the monks never recanted. So King Henry just killed people for disagreeing with him.
He killed people for not giving him the tribute he wanted.
He killed people for thinking for themselves and saying what they thought out loud.
And he was the government. He literally and figuratively controlled the power of the sword.
And that's what can happen when the government doesn't hard code and inherit right to life into its system.
King Henry VIII simply didn't believe that you had that right.
Get in his way, make him mad, and you become one of his mass executions.
So when the founders would think about the right to life, it was no small thing.
It had deep context.
He wasn't the only king that abused people's power, but he was one of them.
And he really reveals what was in the minds of the founder.
It would seem basic and intuitive to us, but that's because the founders explicitly declared the right to life.
So over the course of history and even now in many countries, governments do not act like nor do they believe.
And the laws that they have don't really allow for this fundamental right to life.
For example, Syria tortures with brutality.
They execute their citizens who want freedom.
Africa lists a dozen countries like Cameroon and Somalia, where government kills its citizens.
China, China's abuses against whole population groups include forced harvesting of organs while the people are still alive.
So whether you're looking at Democracy Index, which is put together by the United Kingdom's publishers of The Economist or the Freedom in the World Study,
which is produced by Freedom House, over half of the world's citizens today do not have an explicitly guaranteed right to life.
The recent invasion by Russia and Ukraine for no good reason at all exposes what's almost always happening in the world.
In all these trouble spots, these violations are happening all the time.
This violates right now.
The current insertion of Russia into Ukraine just grabs the media's attention because the aggressor possesses nuclear weapons and the victim is in Europe.
At bottom, Russia doesn't respect the right to life.
But this is also now true in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, China, Iran, North Korea, Burundi and Burma, just to name a few.
And for over 100 countries, the right to life is not a pillar of freedom that their citizens can count on, rely on.
But every.
One should be able to rely on, count upon the right to life.
I mean, without it, you live in a constant state
of fear and oppression.
Our country was really set up in a unique way.
Its foundation is based on an explicit belief
that the government serve its citizens, not rule over them.
So in the previous four episodes of The Very Fair Show,
I described this foundation, and I call them
your seven citizen mandates.
The Constitution was a social contract
that was based on the explicit or implicit understanding
of these mandates.
Government shall be limited, obey its own laws,
apply all laws equally, protect the rights of the individual,
support economic freedom, be governed
under the consent of the people, and honor freedom rights.
So at the end of the day, the mandates
reveal that government's supposed
to operate with some humility.
With the foundation putting government in its proper place,
the three pillars of freedom can stand tall.
And the right to life, the right to your own existence,
is the very first pillar of freedom.
The founders believed that every human is special,
and that government should protect all innocent life.
In fact, the primary reason for a strong national defense
rests on the right to life.
By protecting its citizens from the devastation of war,
for example, and just witness what
happens when a government's not able to protect
its citizens in war zones.
Or when a city foolishly defunds the police,
innocent people lose their life.
So this wasn't some superficial belief that just sounded good.
The founders believed that human life was inspired by God.
Now, not all the founders were practicing Christians,
but they all believed in natural rights and natural law.
They all believed that humans are special.
They are created, and they're created with those rights.
So how do we know this?
Well, they all have writings, and they all
have records of speeches that they made in their careers.
And of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence,
they all identified themselves as Christians.
And all but one were Protestants.
Now, they might not all practice their Christian faith
in the same way you might think of it today,
but they all identified themselves that way.
Four were either present or former ministers,
and a number of the signers were the sons of clergy.
At least half of them had studied divinity
at the various universities they attended.
32 of the 56 signers, 57%, were Episcopalians.
13 were Congregationalists, 12 were Presbyterians,
two were Quakers, and two were Unitarians.
And one was Roman Catholic.
All but two believed that every human is carefully planned,
special creation event by a caring God.
And all of them believed that every person has a right
to his or her own life, and that it cannot be predetermined
by the requirements of a bureaucracy
or the actions of a legislator or a jurist.
The founders understood power-hungry tyrants,
and they insisted that government has to be restrained,
and that it can never be so powerful that it can never
again execute innocent life.
At least that was the intent of the Declaration.
So the problem in their observation was simple.
Too much power in the hands of a king like Henry,
or even someone like Oliver Cromwell,
who fought an autocratic king, too much power was a bad thing.
All of them are guilty of practicing disregard for life.
And to the founders, this arbitrary behavior
is so well-known, it must be checked.
So when the Declaration of Independence
includes the philosophical foundation
for how the new country will be governed,
it has deep meaning.
Most of them had a personal family story
where the right to life was threatened
in the proximity of their recent ancestry.
And we're gonna touch on one of those next week.
It's George Washington's fam.
So what's the right to life?
Well, technically, the right to life is the belief
that all innocent humans have the right to live,
and in particular, should not be killed
by any government entity.
And along with that, you've got the right
to make your own decisions about your health.
You have the right to make your own social decisions.
You have the right to you.
The Declaration of Independence calls it
an unalienable right, a right where there is no dispute,
universal, fundamental.
They are natural rights.
Natural rights are not dependent on the laws,
the customs, or the culture of any place on the planet.
They cannot be repealed by human laws.
They cannot be reversed.
And when the Declaration said
that these three freedom rights were based on nature
and nature's God,
they are meant to be above any government's reach.
that no one, no government can ever violate them. So in the same way that the law of gravity is true,
natural rights are true. And natural law simply identifies the legal parameters of natural rights.
That's what they mean when they say that these truths are self-evident. In fact, the first
draft of the Declaration contemplated that this term sacred instead, you know, these truths are
sacred, that these truths really have some holy background to them. But that sounded too religious
and nobody wanted to state religion. And the majority of Episcopalian Anglicans,
derivative of the Church of England, did not want to diminish the minority Unitarians.
So they changed the term from sacred to self-evident, shifting the tone to an explicit
reliance on natural law. What's self-evident? What's so obvious? What's based on natural law?
Truth. These truths are self-evident. The right to life is an absolute truth. A hundred percent of
the founders agreed, and anyone with an honest brain can deduce the logic, life is self-evident.
It should be a right. And when they laid out these ideas, they explicitly did so in the context
that all men are created equal. And what that meant is that they are endowed by their creator
with these rights, bequeathed, given. They chose the word creator versus God. It was a tamed down,
toned down version of God with the same argument that they had replaced sacred with self-evident.
This gave comfort to those with non-sectarian beliefs. They could all rally behind the notion
that all people are special since we're created by the same creator. This establishes another
absolute truth. We all have equal value. Each person has equal value regardless of where they
were born or what family they were born into, regardless of color. You still have as much value
as the next guy. And that's why it was such a blow, a deep anguishing blow to John Adams,
because he was coerced to relent on the slavery issue. He wanted the slavery issue debunked
in the Declaration of Independence. And as described in the previous episode,
and we'll go into more detail in the next episode, he lost that argument to the South.
The Judeo-Christian belief among the founders also meant that we are special among the animals,
that we could find purpose and meaning in life with the capacity to think, believe, trust, hope,
produce, and operate autonomous from our appetites and our instincts. The right to life
is a moral certainty. It's absolute. Natural law was described by Roman philosophers from
Cicero to Bible authors like the Apostle Paul, to Catholic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas,
or Protestant thinkers like Calvin and Luther. And it led to this great challenge against the
divine right of kings. It really led to freedom. Every one of the founders believed that there is
a creator. They might've described it in different ways. They may have allowed for different
relationship levels with the creator, different involvements of the creator being personally
involved. Some of them believe the creator more in the deistic term. And they diverged on these
doctrinal issues, but they all agreed that the Genesis account of the creation of humans was
essentially true. And here's what I mean by essentially true. In this creation account,
there are those that teach that all of those creation accounts are literal and some believe
that they are allegorical, but that the essence of the creation account is true. There are those
that believe that each creation day is an epic up to billions of years each, which would allow for a
lot of science to fit neatly in them. And there's those that believe that each creation day was 24
hours from some perspective in space. And those that believe that it was 24 literal hours from
the perspective of earth, but they all agreed on two things. First, all the creation events were to
prepare life for humans. Those creation events happened by the voice of God. Those are really
cool creation events. Let there be, and it was, he spoke and it was. The second is that the creation
event of mankind was different and special from getting the universe and the world habitable.
This was involving forming in Genesis 1 26, the whole Trinity is involved. Then God said, let us
make or form man in our image after our likeness. And the next verse captures the execution of the
plan to make humans. It says, so God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God,
he created them.
male and female, he created them.
People are special, they all have equal value.
Way back before there was any oppression to disrupt the plan,
men and women had equal value.
To the founders, this absolute was as certain as
Newton's first law that an object will not change
its motion unless some other outside force acts upon it.
You absolutely are born with special rights, equal rights,
and the right to life is based on the belief
that you are created in the image of God, and it's obvious.
Humans have the capacity to think,
organize, design, create, and produce.
It means that humans can develop and become better.
A dolphin is an amazing animal,
but it doesn't get professional development
and improve its skills,
and it doesn't design and build skyscrapers.
The image of God meant that people could uniquely use words
with power to create.
Dolphins can use communications to kill a shark,
but people can speak forth and write things down,
and engineers from all over the world can send CAD files,
these computer files, to various construction teams
in other parts of the world,
and through massive coordination and planning,
take these abstract concepts and make them a reality.
For example, that's how the tallest skyscraper
in Dubai was built,
but everyone knew that the right to life
was a foundational proof of natural law.
People are special.
It's a foundational concept of Christians and Jews,
and for every deist,
it was understood through the lens of natural rights.
So in fact, all these human rights come from natural rights.
Those opposed to any sense of moral absolutes
are against natural rights because of its certainty
and because they elevate humans as special on the earth,
ones who can respond in worship,
and after the U.S. became a country,
many scholars from Germany
attempted to dethrone the U.S. leadership
and freedom principles by a concerted effort
of inserting a challenge to natural rights,
and out of that challenge to natural rights,
that anti-God, anti-absolute,
anti-belief in human specialness thinking,
the horrors of World War II were justified and happened.
I'm going to prove that out in a coming episode.
So after the horrors of World War II,
the United Nations agreed upon a declaration of human rights.
Article 1 of the Declaration of Human Rights
from the United Nations is that all humans are born free.
And equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience.
Now, how about them apples?
You're talking about the United Nations,
and you've got a lot of non-Christian actors
joining in the chorus.
This is in 1948.
These rights are endowed.
They're somehow granted, bequeathed from the outside,
not a government.
They're bestowed on you upon your birth.
They're built in by birth.
Article 2, it establishes that all the rights and freedoms
are available to everyone, regardless of race, color,
sex, language, religion, political or other opinion,
national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
So the UN catches up with the Declaration of Independence
172 years later, and says these rights are for everyone,
since everyone is created with equal value.
Article 3, everyone has the right to life,
liberty and the security of person.
So the UN is fresh off of the horrors of World War II,
and it admits that the founders of the United States
had it right all along.
Natural rights are beyond the authority of any government
or any international body to dismiss.
So what does the right to life include?
Well, it certainly includes all those lives in the womb.
The author of Psalm 139 says that God forms you
in your inward parts and wove you in your mother's womb.
The term right to life predates the abortion issue
by two centuries.
But if the government is to protect any life,
it should protect the lives of the innocent
and the vulnerable.
As the abortion issue was gaining steam around the world,
the Pope on October 29th, 1951, addressed some midwives
and said the following, every human being,
even the child in the womb has the right to life
directly from God and not from his parents,
not from any society or human authority.
Therefore, there is no man, no society, no human authority,
no science, no indication at all, whether it be medical,
eugenic, social, economic, or moral,
that may offer or give a valid judicial title
for a direct, deliberate life.
deliberate disposal of an innocent life.
And you know what?
The Pope had it right.
If the government should do anything,
it should protect innocent life.
In the Torah, we find that murder is forbidden
and that killing is only allowed in self-defense,
capital punishment, or justified war.
The right to life does not preclude capital punishment.
There are those who murder and their lives
can be taken swiftly without torture by government
as a just punishment that fits the crime.
The right to life does not preclude just war.
There are heinous crimes that power-hungry,
evil governments will carry out
upon large swaths of people.
If they're not stopped, they'll do big time harm.
It was moral to stop Hitler.
It was wrong to wait until millions of Jews were executed
before we stopped Hitler.
The US was initially an isolationist in World War II,
just letting Hitler and the other tyrants have their way.
But finally, in 1942, our government stepped up.
In fact, there's a poster that was developed
by the Office of War Management.
It was widely distributed.
And here's what it said, July 4th, 1776.
When our declaration was signed,
loyal Americans were of one mind to protect life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
166 years later, 1942, when this poster comes out,
we are of one mind.
Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito
shall never take from us the freedom
for which our forefathers sacrificed their lives
and fortunes.
So Hitler out of Germany, Mussolini out of Italy,
and Hirohito out of Japan were all horrible dictators,
slaughtering people with no regard for life.
So stopping them was just, the war was just.
In America, before the present day,
woke, nonsense, idiocy,
and before the revisionist activists
changed what actually happened in history and revised it,
we taught our eighth grade civic students
that the preamble in the Declaration of Independence
was true.
You had a right to life.
And that what it was doing,
the Declaration of Independence,
was merely restating already proven absolute truth.
You don't have to believe in God
to believe that you have a right to life.
All people are created equal.
They're all given this indisputable right to life.
Now, certainly not every founder
who identified themselves as a Christian
practiced the Christian faith.
But as it pertains to life,
the Judeo-Christian idea is that life
should be celebrated for three reasons.
We're created for a purpose,
we're created at a specific time.
It's not accidental.
And we're created to give glory to God.
But even if you don't believe those things
that make life full,
it's known that humans possess the capacity
for reason, morality, language, personality,
and purpose uniquely.
We possess the capacity to experience and understand
love, truth, and beauty.
That we are made by God in the image of God
is what gives all men and women deep value.
The early church leader, James,
says that we shouldn't curse one another
because that person like you
is equally made in God's likeness.
So those who bear God's image should not be disrespected.
Cultures that reject the idea that mankind is special
have no problem abusing other human beings.
And there's a bunch of cultures
that have no problem abusing other human beings.
The founders wanted to set the stage
for each individual citizen to enjoy a deep
and confident assurance
that government would protect every citizen's right to life.
You could marry whom you choose.
You could build a family in peace.
You could work where you want it.
You could go to the medical doctor you wanted to go to.
You could take care of your own life
the way that you felt is best for your life.
You could worship God however you pleased.
And the government would not interfere.
The right to life is a pillar.
And it's the first pillar of freedom.
It's the first freedom principle.
And from it, there are dozens
of derivative freedom principles.
It's a right.
It's given to us by God, not the government.
And no government should take it away.
God bless you to your freedom.
Hi, I'm David Farah.
Thank you for listening to my dad's podcast,
The Barry Farah Show, Culture Shift.
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