God-Given Rights: A Crucial Denial of a Foundation of Conservatism at National Review

At National Review, a self-professing bastion of conservatism, Jonah Goldberg, one of its most well known, talented, and prominent contributors, writes of the Suicide of the West, beginning with these two paragraphs:

Let’s begin with some somewhat unusual assertions for these pages. 

Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. God didn’t give us these things, or anything else. We stumbled into modernity accidentally, not by any divine plan.

Goldberg offers suicide as an antidote for suicide.  One of the six canons of conservatism in Russell Kirk's, The Conservative Mind, a sort of manual or authority for conservatism is the

belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of duty and right, which links great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.

Goldberg says, no, it's an accident.  Thank our lucky stars.  He says further, apparently warding away the suicide of the West:

Humans are animals. We evolved from other animals, who evolved from ever more embarrassing animals, and before that from a humiliating sea of primitive critters in the primordial stew. Almost everything we take for granted today — technology, prosperity, medicine, human rights, the rule of law — is a novel, unnatural environment for humans, created by humans.

At the top of the Supreme Court building is Moses, who received the law from God.  The rights we possess are not unnatural, but natural proceeding from revelation, general or natural and the special, the tablets in Moses's hands.

It's nice to find out what some people really think, what drives their commentary and their analysis, in this case, Goldberg.  His bedrock views don't make any sense at all.  You can choose between his lying eyes or a roll of the dice.

America arose as a consequence of scripture.  The Bible, God's Word, delivered men from darkness.  States united by consent of free men, who understood that they did not receive their rights from government, but from God.  The Declaration of Independence dissolved the bond between crown and colonists according to natural rights, self-evident ones.

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I didn't write a lot here, but wrote all that I wanted for this.  Much more could be said, but I decided to see if there were other criticisms of Goldberg.  What he wrote is enough for me not to trust him.  He's clever, but this kind of "conservatism" borrows from a Christian worldview without believing it.  It will mess up everything he says.

Here are some other criticisms though:  American Greatness, hangtogetherblog