If you reject natural law, you most likely believe in what we call the Nation-State Model: the idea that law is made by nation-states. Most of us were raised inside it, so it feels normal. But when you look at it squarely, the Nation-State Model is far stranger than anything on this site.
Right and wrong have a birthday
Every one of your "laws" has a birth date, a date before which it didn't exist. Before that date, something could be perfectly fine. After it, the same act is a serious crime. Or the other way around.
We don't mean customs gradually shifting in or out of acceptance over generations. We mean an abrupt and total reversal of right and wrong, in a single instant. At 11:59 PM, right and wrong are one way. At 12:01 AM, two minutes later, they're entirely different.
Can morality really work like that?
The Law of the Earth has no date of passage. It simply is. It has always existed, and it has always been the same.
Right and wrong change at the river
Every nation-state has a different set of "laws." Which one is correct?
Nation-states "solve" this by assigning each set to a different patch of land. Cross from one country to the next, or one province, or even one town, and right and wrong change.
You can wade across a stream, and on the far bank the very meaning of being a good and decent person is different.
How can that be?
No dictator has ever violated human rights
Where do human rights come from? Are they part of what we are, or do they come from government? Do we have rights only if the government says we do?
North Korea and Saudi Arabia are widely recognized as violators of human rights. In North Korea, people have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed for criticizing the leader, practicing religion, or watching foreign films. In Saudi Arabia, people have been jailed, flogged, and executed for blogging, for questioning religion, or for dissent.
You probably think of these as horrific violations of human rights. But according to the Nation-State Model, the model you say you believe in, they aren't.
Under that model, human rights come from government. People have rights only if their government grants them. The North Korean government never granted its people those rights. Neither did Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Pol Pot's Cambodia. If the people never had the rights, there was nothing to violate.
Follow it all the way through. If government is the source of rights, and the government doesn't believe you have any, then you don't have any, so there are none for it to violate. By definition, a dictator is someone who doesn't recognize human rights. So under this model, no dictator in history has ever violated a human right.
That is insane. And you know it.
The Law of the Earth recognizes that human rights are innate. They don't come from government. They come from existence. We are born with all of them. No government can grant them, and no legislation can take them away. That power was never theirs.
Doesn't that sound more sane?
It has no limits
Under the Nation-State Model, there is no limit on what can be made "legal." Theft? Certainly, as long as the right people take the right amount from the right people. Murder? Pass a law. Rape? Only get a majority first. Under this model, even the abuse of children could be made legal with enough votes.
The Nation-State Model places no limit on what a nation-state may do.
That's crazy.
So who's crazy?
We're not the ones who are crazy. What's crazy is what you've been taught all your life. Seeing how strange the Nation-State Model really is, wouldn't you at least be curious about a different one?
The next pages lay out that different one, one step at a time, beginning with the ground everything else stands on: truth.
