Fundamental Human Rights

"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." 

As atheists, since you don't believe in God, from whom then do we recieve our fundamental human rights from?  You better not say the government or the people, because they'll just as soon take them away.  Heck, even when it wasn't theirs to take away, that still didn't stop them from trying for most of history, and in most of the world today.

Even if those rights were given to us by God, the government or people could still take them away. That statement is really just a poetic way of saying that they feel that those rights should not be violable by anyone, ever. The idea that humans have fundamental rights that cannot be taken away is nonsense, really: in authoritarian regimes such rights are taken away all the time. The statement is really a veiled "ought", not an "is".

And as Genetic_Code alluded to, the idea that morals come from God (effectively what this is saying) is also a rather problematic thing to say. If morals realy did come from God, then one would have to conclude that killing innocent lives would be perfectly moral provided that some omnipotent creator told us to do so. Rather, we would conclude that God would not do that, because it is immoral. But if there are moral laws that God could theoretically violate, then we must conclude that moral standards do not come from God, but rather that God perfectly obeys them.

I can't find the exact quote at the moment, but there's a quote from Gottfried Leibniz that reads something along these lines: if everything God could possibly do were inherently good, then what would be the purpose of celebrating the good things that God does, if doing the opposite would have been equally good?

metaphysically speaking, the Atheist really cannot have an answer to your question. After all, if moral values exist on the atheist worldview, they exist abstractly. How does THAT give us any moral obligation?

Epistemically speaking of course, they are self-evident. Our human rights are in every way properly basic. The Theist approaches the METAPHYSICS of morality and tries to argue that God exists, not the EPISTEMOLOGY of moral values (Unless, of course, the Atheist denies that rights and moral values exist, in which case we have to approach moral epistemology)

I read an interesting ethical theory - forgot the name - saying that our entire system of ethics can be derived purely from self-ownership. Just thought I'd throw that in there. >_>Funky_Llama