re: What is the source of our rights?

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Our rights come from God.

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No. They don't. They come from us.

EDIT: :As my response did not add anything to the discussion, let me elaborate by asking a question:

What does that even mean that all rights come from anyone other than ourselves? If I choose to murder someone, then is that because God gave me the "right" to murder someone, or just gave me the "right" to choose to murder someone? Does it even matter? I still chose to murder someone. It's my choice even if it fundamentally comes from God or wherever else.

My point is that any rights that we have (even if do believe they originate from God) we exercise them or not. There is no metaphysical or other force preventing us from doing whatever we want if we choose to do something other than the physical laws of the universe. If I wasn't given the "right" to murder someone and I went to go murder someone and really wanted to - there's no invisible force to stop me from murdering - the only thing that would stop me is physical force, either someone restraining me or killing me first.

So our "rights" always inevitably come from ourselves - or at least the exercise of our rights which is just the same thing.

Rights are natural; they are inherent to our being. But there can only be individual rights, because the notion of group rights implies that some individuals need special privileges given to them, which is not a right. You have the right to your own life, the right to your liberty, and the right to your property. And that’s pretty much it, provided you don’t violate these same rights of other people.

All these things like civil rights and voting rights and gay rights and trans rights are made up nonsense and confuse a right with a privilege. How the frick is voting a right? I don’t know you, you don’t have a right to vote on how my money gets spent and where my taxes go.

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There are better questions

What is a right?

Who/what defines what a right is?

What is the comprehensive list of rights?

What erodes those concepts we reference as "rights"?

Much more important and salient questions

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Are these even universally definable or answerable though? So much depends on societal context. What we consider to be rights and what tribes in Papua New Guinea think are rights would be different and both would be correct, right?

"Rights" are nothing more than a term used to loosely define what freedoms the general public can secure through the use of force.

In tUSA, rights are based on the idea og property. I own myself. I own what I produce for myself. I only have the right to that if I can defend it.

Wrong

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Unless you're a slave, woman, if you don't own property, etc.

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Just because terrible mistakes were made in those days doesn’t mean that they overall idea that we are born with certain God given rights is false.

Even if you don’t believe in God, I think it can still be agreed upon that humans are born with some basic rights. Sometimes governments and other people infringe upon these basic rights.

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was written before we were America.

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Who wrote it?

Follow up question, who wrote the documents that made us America?

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Who wrote it?

Follow up question, who wrote the documents that made us America?

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Neither question means anything since those same people tried something totally different than what they ended up doing and none of the three ended up in official "American" documents.

An important part of our history? Yes

Means anything to our rights currently? No.

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Rights come from God. If they came from Government, then they would be gifts, not rights

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The only rights God gives us is rights in the afterlife. Too many Christian countries do not recognize the same rights we do and we do not recognize some of the rights they do. I won't even ask about rights before the belief in a Christian god or even which God of what belief gives those rights.

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Believing that they are given by Government means Govt has no limits. It can give. It can take away.

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Governments never "give" rights. They only recognize them if forced. They sure do have the authority and take them away with no apparent recourse that I am aware of. Even here. Unborn have no rights to anything. We have free speech zones and must fill out a petition to voice our opinion officially. We must pay every year just to be safe and secure in our own abode. We do not even have the right to our own income prior to government taking what is theirs.

No. Rights do not come from God. Rights do not come from government. The idea of rights come from man. The abled bodied men of a nation specifically. The abled bodied men, who through the use of force, are the only ones capable of ensuring whatever rights we deem to have, get enshrined in the laws of whatever nation we are talking about at the moment. To think that God gives them to you and not you, does mean we are lost. It means you willing give up your responsibility to ensure those rights, which were fought for previously, will just be taken care of by a being who we, as humans, cannot agree on.

But sure, say God.