endowned by the Creator

the Constitution says human rights come from God. Why is this important? The good bishop explains:

I’d like to respond to a disturbing contention from Senator Tim Kaine, during a recent confirmation hearing. pic.twitter.com/hvaYlQQybi

— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) September 4, 2025

the idea that our rights come from a higher power means that even the poor and weak have human rights.

In the modern world, it means the bioethicists who want to expand the idea of personhood so that the mentally handicapped can lose their basic rights and be used for experimentation, transplants, or just killed outright sound like the eugenicists who inspired the Nazis who see the weak and poorest as useless eaterd

when in 40 years we have gone from jusifying aborting our inconvenient children to encouraging the eldelry to kill themselves to encouraging ocieties to kill old people,  one does wonder about where are the ethicists that point out that idea that civilization defends the weak? 

 hIstorian Tom Holland has done quite a bit of thinking on this and as a historian of the Classical world and Islam has later written books on how Christiainty is behind much of the human rights ideas of today's world: and what not every secular writer reading it noticed why: Because the Cross changed the idea of glorifying power (to a Roman, the cross meant to show the power of Rome over those who rebelled against secular authority) to the idea that it is the weak who are important.

How, Holland wondered, did the Roman world in which power was the rightful preserve of the powerful, to be used in service of the self as much as one had the power to get away with, become the modern world in which human beings—even vulnerable women—had dignity, and in which power was to be used (in principle, even if not in practice) to protect the weak and vulnerable and oppressed? The tyranny of the strong over the weak still happens, to be sure. But the strong must now mask their tyranny and oppression—hide it behind closed doors, lie about it, recast it in a benign light.Holland’s quest to answer this question resulted in Dominion.