Let’s get this straight, once and for all: INDIVIDUALS have rights – groups do not!
Each and every individual within any and every group has rights.
The group – as a whole – does not.
This is a fundamental distinction.
We must NEVER permit anyone to ‘fudge’ or sweep this distinction away.
If we do, if we permit a group of 10 people, 100 people, a million people, to have rights different from simply the rights of the individuals who make up the group, make no mistake about it: we are endorsing a tyranny of the majority, which is not substantially different from simple ‘mob rule’!
Coming up on the anniversary of the 11/09 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, some obscure priest in the US has announced that he’ll burn the Koran as his expression of freedom of religion.
This has generated huge publicity all over the world – quite out of proportion to the act itself.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I do not like book-burnings. It is too Jesuit-like… (Except that the Jesuits would traditionally shut the whole family, including the kids, in the house in which they found books, before burning the whole structure down. To the best of my knowledge, this preacher does not plan to burn any people – just paper on which some words are printed.)
Now, the Vatican has issued a statement that:
“every religion has the right to expect that its sacred books, places of worship and symbols will be respected and protected”
OH, NO, IT DOESN’T!!!
No ‘religion’ has ‘rights’!
Only individuals have rights!
And YOUR right to religious freedom stops where MY actions begin!
Let’s stop paying lip service to faux rights.
Let’s stop cowering in fear of reprisal for exercising our fundamental rights and freedoms!
I urge each and every one of you to take some ‘holy book’ – does not matter which one, as long as it is considered ‘holy’ by someone… or, even better, one of each of them – and burn them. At least in effigy…
Not because you disrespect them.
But because you have the right to do so!
Because our fundamental rights and freedoms are above any creed or faith or doctorine!
If you don’t use it – you WILL loose it.
Freedom is to important for such a gamble. Don’t loose it – USE IT!
On September 11th, go and burn some ‘holy’ books!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
September 8, 2010 at 12:07
i agree it is the right of the people to burn anything of theirs that they want, no matter how unpalatable it may seem to others.
September 8, 2010 at 14:05
I worry that I don’t have the language quite right but here goes ….
A group does not have the right to exist. An individual does. A group is formed when individuals come together to create it. A group is unformed when the individuals that make it, leave it. Thus, if the group has the right to exist (which would be different than right of individuals to assemble), then the group may prevent the individuals that form it from departing–otherwise the act of an individual leaving the group threatens the existence of the group. More injustices can be logically argued from this premise. Thus, if you are in such a group, then you are a slave to the group. This is fundamentally wrong.
Xanthippa says:
Yes!
That is an EXCELLENT way to put it!!!
Thank you for expressing this important point. I shall ponder this angle!
September 8, 2010 at 23:16
Xanthippa:
You are absolutely right!
(and I like the fire in your tone…)
I’ve had it up to the eyeballs with “the rights of the people,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “the supremacy of the collective.” A century and a half of that crap has lead to nothing by tyranny, extortion, oppression, and genocide.
It’s time we paid proper respect to the inalienable rights of the individual.
The primary rights are the rights to life and liberty, which together imply the right to unrestricted action, limited only by the equal rights of other individuals.
From these follow the rights to act as one sees fit in self-preservation and self-defence, to possess the fruits of one’s own labours and to dispose of them as one sees fit, to own property, to keep one’s affairs private, to keep and to bear arms, to inform oneself and to express oneself without interference or censorship.
From these its also follows that the sole purpose of the state is to equally protect the equal rights of all individuals without discrimination or favouritism of any kind.
And there you have the foundational principles of a free and just society in three simple paragraphs. But it all rests on one self evident truth:
Rights inhere in the individual.
September 18, 2010 at 11:29
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