Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. In a TEDx talk years ago,

Israeli historian Yuval Harari made the startling claim that human rights do not actually exist.

Here's what he said. Quote, human rights are just like heaven and like God.

It's just a fictional story that we've invented and spread around. It's not a biological reality.

Just as jellyfish and woodpeckers and ostriches have no right, homo sapiens have no rights.

Take a human, cut them open, look inside. You find their blood, and you find the hearts and lungs and kidneys, but you don't find

there any rights.

The only place you find rights is in the fictional stories that humans have invented and spread

around.

End quote.

Harari's talk resurfaced on the site formerly known as Twitter and sparked a lively debate

there between Tom Holland, the historian and author

of Dominion, Glenn Scribner, an Anglican priest, an author of The Air We Breathe, and Jordan Peterson,

the Canadian psychologist, an author of 12 Rules for Life. They all took issue with Harare's materialism.

Scribner took issue with it and called his remarks about

human rights nonsense. Rights are indeed faith-based, Scribner said, but that doesn't make them

any less real. Tom Holland, who's not a Christian, maybe yet, responded that while he believes in

human rights, they're not self-evident. Rather, they require an act of subjective belief.

Quote, human rights have no more objective reality than, say, the Trinity, wrote Holland.

Both derive from the workings of Christian theology,

and both, if they're to be believed in, require people to make a leap of faith.

...