Our concerns about Mozilla are unnatural
No doubt you've heard about the resignation on April 3 of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla. Back in 2008, Brendan made a political contribution in support of traditional marriage. When he became CEO on March 24, many in the Mozilla community objected to the appointment of someone they considered homophobic and bigoted. Dating site OKCupid called on visitors to boycott Mozilla's Firefox browser.
The whole business raises concerns about rights and freedoms: the rights of some to seek marriage relationships and the freedom of others to oppose that.
I want to limit my observations on this matter to this:
Our concerns about the resignation of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla are unnatural.
Of course, there is a sense in which they are natural. We naturally assume that we live in a society where rights exist, where they are respected, and where people have freedoms of expression and association. Some have protested that Eich's financial support of Proposition 8 in California infringed on the rights of gays to marry. They applied pressure on Mozilla that eventually led to Eich's resignation. On the other hand, others have protested that in accepting Eich's resignation, and bowing to pressure groups, Mozilla have infringed on Eich's right as a citizen to engage in political processes. We see our concerns as natural, because that's the sort of society we live in.
But ultimately these concerns are not natural. Not in the sense that these concerns arise from the natural world.
Many in our society assume the natural world is all there is. For them, there is neither God nor spirit, nor any phenomena that can't be boiled down to physics and chemistry. Yet human rights and freedoms can't be treated this way.
Christians have no problem with a world of science that has human rights and freedoms embedded in it. We see that God made man from dust, and yet made her in his own image. If God has rights and freedoms, then so do humans.
The naturalist (the person who believes that matter and energy is all that exists) can't deal with human rights in this way. The naturalist must assume that rights and freedoms are merely some sort of social convention.
The problem for the naturalist is immediately apparent: what if society chooses to change its convention? The rights are lost. And where is the freedom to protest if society forbids it?
Whereas a Christian would argue that a person's rights are innate and God-given, a naturalist can only say they're nice-to-haves. The Christian agrees with the UN Declaration of Human rights, that rights are "inalienable" and not able to be separated from the person. The naturalist can only say that's a legal convention.
