The declaration of independence or its wording does not grant us rights , our collective agreement to follow and enforce it does . You still did not answer how a god saying something makes it so , essentially the Euthyphro dilemma still bothers me here . I did answer you . You simply didn ' t understand what I wrote . When we speak of rights , we are speaking normatively and not positively . We are talking about what people ought to have or ought to be able to do , not what people actually are able to do or actually do have . If God endows human beings with the right to life , for example , what this means is that all human beings ought to have the opportunity to live . It does not mean that all human beings actually do have the opportunity to live a wouldbe mother may choose to abort her baby , for example , or a hospital may get blown up in some military air strike that kills several people in it . However , these events do not change the fact that God still endowed human beings with the right to life . The fact that some human beings lost their lives in some incident does not invalidate the proposition that human beings ought to be alive , because these are two fundamentally separate things . One is a positive statement , and the other is a normative statement . If objective natural rights did not exist , then you have no objective basis on which to complain about the deaths of human beings , because there would be no objective reason why human beings ought to be alive in the first place .