It is a mess of a question because our Constitution is a mess. It was created by religious people who believed we had GOD given rights. So all of our laws are an extension of our god given rights. Life, liberty, property. However we want separation of church and state.
So now we wonder why we follow laws? If there is no God, there is no natural law, hence my focus on Locke.
Just get what you can, lying is ok, and we are seeing that at the highest levels. We are rotting. As a culture.
Our laws are becoming meaningless because we have no idea of where they originate from. They originate from GOD. That's the founders interpretation.
I’m still not following on a few things. For example, where does your point about cowardice come into this? And how is that related to Locke? I’ll skip over the part about the Constitution, too.
As to your point about God-given rights, there are different ways of viewing human rights. I doubt anyone would try to seriously argue that they don’t exist in some form; the difficulty is often in how you ground the concept, and how you then take the concept and concretize it in custom and law.
Let’s describe rights succinctly as moral guarantees for a minimum standard of treatment, predicated on an inherent, ‘universal dignity’. They are therefore applicable to all by virtue of what makes us human. Do we need God for this? I don’t think so. You can have both secular and theistic groundings for this, and there are many issues with grounding this moral concept in God (see, e.g. the Euthyphro dilemma). Rights can be grounded in a secular, biological argument – and indeed they have been for hundreds of years.
If you can rationally argue why it is wrong to violate someone’s natural rights, then you can recognise that you have a valid reason not to do it. Do you need to have some sort of cosmic accountability (i.e. God) for it to matter? I’d argue we don’t. This stuff is all still contested, of course, and I’ve not really unpacked it much, but my point is that I don’t really agree that our cultures ‘rot’ without God (or see any evidence for that claim), or that we need a theistic conception of natural rights to respect law. Our laws are derived from a variety of sources.
Psychopath is a cowardly excuse people use AFTER they get caught. Insanity defense is for pussies. Notice "psychopaths" rarely commit crimes against other bad ass psychopaths. Always women and children. John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, all cowards.
Psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder that can be studied scientifically. You can be a coward
and a psychopath, or either one of them in isolation. A lot of those criminals also have a whole bunch of other fucked up things going on with them, including sadism, etc.
