"In the jurisprudence and the law, a right is the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something, or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in civil society. Rights serve as rules of interaction between people, and, as such, they place constraints and obligations upon the actions of individuals or groups (for example, if one has a right to life, this means that others do not have the liberty to kill him)." (wikipedia)

How can rules for behavior be anything except abstract? All rights are are rules for interaction. Rules are ephemeral, and change all the time (some more than others).

No, everything is not an abstraction, only an idiot solipcist would say that. You're taking the ball, and running way past the end zone, here.

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An employee gets trampled to death by a frenzied, greedy mob at a Walmart sale, and customers actually complained when the store closed. Yet, I'm the bad guy for suggesting policies that assume people act like retarded herd animals that need government nannying and control....

If they exist in a conceptual form then they're a human invention. Acceleration is a physics concept only because it was discovered and named, it wasn't invented, it was always there, we just had to find the words to describe it and the science to explain it. But rights aren't the same. If humans didn't exist there would be no such thing as "rights", but acceleration would still be there.

History does not prove your view. While people have often argued about rights over the millennia, that in itself doesn't say anything about the nature of rights.

Which says nothing whatsoever about rights.

John Locke was a respected philosopher and his opinion carries greater weight than yours. Natural law is separate from natural rights.

That's the problem with most people: they don't realize what they have.

Whether evolution or nature or some deity, we're still talking about something outside of (and arguably greater than) man.

Yes, and?

You're being stupid and you know it! Go do some study on the philosophy of natural rights before you go making idiotic statements like this one!

No, the purpose of the Bill of Rights was not to enumerate what rights people had but to further limit the government's power with regard to rights already assumed to exist. THE SOLE PURPOSES OF THE CONSTITUTION WERE TO ESTABLISH THE FORM OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND TO ENUMERATE THE SPECIFIC POWERS OF THAT GOVERNMENT!

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Well, if humans didn't exist there would be no human rights. But the absence of human existence doesn't mean humans invented, discovered or named rights.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

First of all, since your source is Wikipedia, your statement above is dismissed out of hand simply because Wikipedia is never a valid source. Second, notice "In the jurisprudence and the law." There is a specific context set forth there but we're not talking about within the narrow context of jurisprudence and the law (which is the context in which your earlier idiotic statement about the right to an attorney belongs).

Rights are not rules for behavior.

I merely said that one could make the argument (not that I'm making the argument) and the result of the argument (no facts, only subjective concepts). And are you so sure that a solipsist, an adherent to solipsism (a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing) would argue that everything is nothing more than the concept of our own thoughts? Wouldn't the solipsist instead argue that we cannot know anything and that only the self exists? The point was that just because a certain other poster believes rights are merely the concepts of our own thoughts doesn't make it so and I used an outrageous argument to illustrate that it doesn't make it so.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Okay.

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An employee gets trampled to death by a frenzied, greedy mob at a Walmart sale, and customers actually complained when the store closed. Yet, I'm the bad guy for suggesting policies that assume people act like retarded herd animals that need government nannying and control....

You've got to be kidding. If there were no humans, the most sentient animals on the planet, there would be no concept of "rights". Nature is, as Tennyson put it, "red in tooth and claw". Animals have no concept of "rights" and plants aren't sentient. Humans invented, didn't discover, "rights".

Wow.....I think the old guys had it right.

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The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish! - Frederick Bastiat

Are you so sure? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it does that mean the tree didn't fall?

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

This is making the assumption that rights already exist.

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"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states...Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."



~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.