Human rights -- one of the societal evils?

[unless_spring]

I got an interesting discussion going on a couple of my private social media channels about this church sign in Austin, Texas. So I thought it warrants a public blog post, summarizing various people's opinions. Apologies to those who have seen this discussion before. This is the last time I'm posting about it.

Comments

[chardin]

I believe my theory was that they didn't make a very good sign, more through incompetence than ill intent.

Did anyone try to contact the organization and ask them what they meant?

[chardin]

Oh, come on. Their URL was on the sign, and the address they gave on the subject was on their website!

Their position, by the way, is that humans shoukd have rights, but that God is a better guarantor than man of those rights. They weren't hostile to the concept itself.

Not one of you checked this?

[unless_spring]

Are you arguing with yourself, Chuck, or was there a deleted comment in between? I didn't get a notification of any other comments.

No one I know contacted the church to find out, but my mom actually found this PDF on the church website:

http://www.cccaustin.com/images/stories/pdfs/yhaptp-cg-challenge.pdf

that contains a phrase:

"Visit a website that tracks human rights violations and pray about what you can do."

Well, so they are talking about human rights *violations* after all, but I believe that the billboard and the first page of the website are an intentional head-scratcher. Or, as you put less charitably, they are trolling.

[chardin]

I am wondering about people who doubtless think of themselves as realists and empiricists, but who would rather speculate on the motives behind a sign -- speculate, hell, impute -- and not bother to ask a question or look at a webpage.

The trolling idea was a joke. Your apparent refusal to consider that their sign was ill-drafted by accident is a joke at a different level.