Secular Rationalizing No Foundation for Rights

The Christian Foundation of Human Rights

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  This is the kind of thinking I would like to recommend.

We don't know the nature of Jefferson's religious beliefs or doubts, or disbeliefs  He seems to have been as original in this respect as in many others. But we do know he had recourse to the language and assumptions of Judeo-Christianity to articulate a vision of human nature.  Each person is divinely created and given rights as a gift from God.  And since these rights are given to him by God, he can never be deprived of them without defying some divine intent. Jefferson has used Scripture to assert a particular form of human exceptionalism, one that anchors our nature, that is to say our dignity, in a reality outside the world of circumstance.  . . .

What would a secular paraphrase of this sentence look like?
  In what nonreligious terms is human equality self-evident?  As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was certainly in a position to know.  What would be the nonreligious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case?  Every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way to ignoring or denying the most minimal claims to justice in any form that deserves the name.  The temptation is always present and powerful because the rationalizations are always ready to hand.  One group is congenitally inferior, another is alien or shiftless, or they are enemies of the people or of the state.  Yet others are carriers of intellectual or spiritual contagion.

Jefferson makes the human person sacred, once by creation and again by endowment, and thereby sets individual rights outside the reach of rationalization.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), p. 162f.]