It's both. Funny that these nameless religious scholars don't recognize that the group of people belonging to it are a religion but at least one dictionary does:

⛓️‍💥[Removed]:

"the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices"

At any rate, defining exactly what a religion is is at best disputable, but by all means, please provide me with evidence that all religious scholars do not include the body of believers as a component or definition of religion. I'll wait . . .

So you keep saying; which leads me to believe that you think that there is something "negative" about negative rights and "positive" about positive rights. ( I wonder what you make of the "value judgements" implied by batteries and magnets? )

I think nothing of the sort. You're the one that keeps suggesting that negative rights are the valid ones and positive rights are not. The value judgment is yours, not mine.

However, these terms are free of any value. All we need to know is that my freedom of speech only requires you to be passive for me to exercise it. If however, I claim that my right to free speech requires you to post my ravings on your blog, I've turned it into a positive right I can't exercise without your active support.

Bullshit. If you left it at that and did not go on to conclude that negative rights are valid and positive rights are not, then they would be free of any value assessment. But you don't. My being passive or not has no bearing on the moral validity of rights, whether positive or negative. There is nothing inherent to the universe that stipulates you have a right to exist. Find me evidence that the universe has somehow codified your right to exist. There is none. You exist because you exist, not because the universe says you have a right to. The universe is not sentient as far as we know, much less moral.

If I truly believed that the terms "positive" and "negative" were value judgements, I might hesitate to state that I always value the negative and am skeptical about whether the burdens imposed by the positive can be justified.

The terms themselves are not value judgments. It is we who attach values to them. That has been my point all along. There might be good reasons to do so in some, maybe even most, cases. Nevertheless, that's not the same thing as saying they're inherently valuable.

All rights which can be exercised by being left alone and which make no claims on others should be allowed.

On what grounds? And please avoid circular reasoning here. Why should we always recognize another person's right to exist (much less an animal's), even if society has a strong vested interest otherwise? Let's say a terrorist takes over a small plane with a handful of people on board. The plane is clearly headed towards a stadium or some place full of people, but the air force can take it out before it does untold damage. The people on the plane are destined to die anyway at that point, but we can avoid the huge casualty toll. Why shouldn't we do it? Actually, let's examine an actual case: the Flight 93 disaster. I'm going to assume not everyone on the plane agreed to the decision to crash the plane into the ground. Would you, then, say that the people responsible committed murder, or would you say that it was justifiable homicide? Are there any situations where you would consider homicide justifiable? It seems to me that if you believe in the sanctity of negative rights that there can be no situation where you would agree that there is such a thing.

WOW. Just WOW.

That explains a lot.

I don't know why you're surprised. This is the position I've maintained all along.

I myself beg to differ. I hold, as did many of the Founding Fathers, that an idea is the only property which multiplies when another takes it. And that this is a good thing.

But when others take on your ideas or beliefs, they must necessarily lose other ideas or beliefs. I cannot, for example, be an atheist and a Christian at the same time. The same applies to pretty much every idea. Other than conceptually, you cannot simultaneously adhere to conflicting ideas about things. That is, you could retain information about atheism and Christianity, but you cannot simultaneously believe in them both (unless you're a complete lunatic.) Moreover, ideas are memetic. They can influence you in some ways even if you resist them, and not all ideas are equally valuable. Some ideas can very easily be used for destructive ends. So the mere replication of ideas is not always a good thing.

Perhaps, if I were a rampaging egomaniac, I might feel threatened by others' expressing their thoughts. But I believe that ideas, like art, belong to others the moment they're released into the wild.

I don't disagree that freedom of speech is a bad thing. I have enough faith in humanity that I think, in the end, the best ideas will win out (even if sometimes it takes awhile.) I could not support the Social Contract if I didn't. Nevertheless, I also recognize that ideas are not inherently valuable and can be used for good or ill. Everything in existence, even concepts, are tools that can be used for good or ill. I am strongly opposed to censorship except in maybe the most extreme cases, but I still recognize that information about building nuclear bombs could be used by terrorists to destroy me or those I love. The existence of ideas or information does not inherently contribute value to society.

Nor do I believe that the market of ideas is a zero-sum game in which Dissident and I cancel each other out by virtue of our stances on Capitalism. Far from it. I believe that what others can glean from the back-and-forth is not a mutual annihilation, but at the very least a few more sources to look up for more nuanced reading on Communism and Capitalism.

I never claimed that all ideas are of negative value. That would be the flip-side of the notion that all ideas are of positive value--my position is that ideas have no inherent value one way or the other but can be used in positive or negative ways. Nevertheless, it's stupid not to recognize that those who adopt an idea or viewpoint must sacrifice another. Using other ideas as a means to clarifying your own is not necessarily a bad thing (but nor is it necessarily a good thing, if you hold to ideas that are destructive and malicious.) So, once again, we are still left with the realization that nothing, even sharing ideas, has inherent value.

However, all this ignores the very real fact that my ability to whistle a tune in my shower takes absolutely nothing from you. If you feel threatened by my exercise of this negative Right in the abstract, then its your problem.

Wrong. Your mere existence takes up oxygen and space, which are valuable resources for those competing for them. Moreover, any activity you engage in, including existing, requires energy, which is another resource we're all competing for. I don't feel threatened by your right to whistle (or to exist); that's an extreme label to lay on someone. But I'm under no illusion that your existence--and everyone else's--requires resources that are limited. To pretend otherwise is foolish.

And its precisely because negative Rights can be exercised without others even being aware that their exercise is so darn difficult for those who ARE threatened to quash.

In the abstract this sounds good, but when you examine the reality you can see that the cumulative effects of your existence cannot go unnoticed. That we do not currently possess the ability to measure precisely how much oxygen every human being (to say nothing of every other animal) is using doesn't mean that they aren't using it. Obviously they are. This is offset by the fact that plants generate oxygen, but the more animals taking up space on the planet, the less room there is for plants to exist. It is necessary that there be some kind of balance between plants and animals in order for us all to breathe.

Of course, the public exercise of negative Rights is the epitome of tolerance.

I agree, but I accept that this tolerance is a) a gift of humanity, not a right provided by the universe, and b) not without its limitations. And, as a corollary of (a), it is evident that we give tolerance in expectation of getting it back. It could not work if it was a one-way street.

Erm. "Rights are inherently valuable?" I never lumped everything called "Rights" together. And I even tried to illustrate how negative rights are positive while positive rights are often negative.

I seem to recall you and I arguing over this very point before, but I may be mistaken. I do remember LGs taking that position. If you do not claim that any sort of rights--even negative rights--are inherently valuable, then I have no gripe with you on this. But if that's the case, then why the hell are you debating me over this? Or perhaps you are just assuming that my use of the term 'rights' in the general sense above means that I think you believe all rights are inherently valuable. I never made such a claim, nor do I believe it. But you do seem to be arguing that at least one kind of rights--negative rights--are inherently valuable. if that's the case, I will still disagree with you fervently.

But we've already done this one to death. EVERYONE denied their negative rights has argued that they ought to have them; from those attempting to form a State to the lone anarchist. This seems to be the one constant of human history; that many have argued to limit the rights of others, but none have argued for less freedom for themself.

That everyone argues for them demonstrates that the idea has value to enough people that they should be implemented, and have been for the most part. That's the Social Contract at work. The SC works, and is constantly improved upon, because ultimately the best ideas tend to win out. Ergo, most people who are moral have difficulty accepting that they should have rights while others should not. There are setbacks, of course, for certain groups at certain times and in certain places, as MAPs well know. But the overall arc of history is toward liberation and equality for everyone. That's why I have faith in the system and am not an anarchist or anti-statist. I recognize the reality for what it is. Yes, it's flawed, but anarchy is a temporary solution and there's no guarantee it will make things better for anyone, least of all us. At any rate, it is nigh impossible to overthrow a strong state, which is as it should be.

I suggest that you educate yourself about the value-free distinction between positive rights and negative rights.

I know what the value-free distinction between the two is. The problem is that you and others seem to want to make the leap from that to 'Negative rights are inherently valuable' without any hard evidence for it. I accept that negative rights are valuable, but only because we say they are. I can even accept that there's some logic in the proposition that negative rights are better than positive rights because they're the easiest to enact and to enforce. That's a far cry though from claiming they have some kind of intrinsic value. Just because something is easy doesn't necessarily make it right. Didn't we learn in elementary school that the easiest solution is not always the best?

However, as an Anarchist, I see freedom as freedom from the interference of others where I have harmed none. I do not see freedom as something requiring me to steal resources from others by proxy through goons with guns.

See, this notion that you harm no one be simply being is false. The harm you impose by merely existing cannot even be said to be the minimal amount of you can impose, unless you spend every waking moment serving others and only taking what is necessary to live. In that case you may even have a surplus of benefit over harm, but the harm you have inflicted is still not zero. Do you get where I'm coming from here?