Governmental rights are for the most part meant to limit the power of the government. The Bible seems to limit the power of government. “Eye for an eye.”

This is not the same thing. The idea of rights is almost exclusively an Enlightenment idea. The lex talionis represents an idea of justice, not a statement of governmental obligation.

There’s also a very important sense in which all governments are set up by God, good and bad. (See Daniel 2:21, 4:17ff).
It seems that the whole reason for earthly governments is that people do not submit to God’s will. It’s as if they need someone visible to be in charge.

Accountability is very important. But that doesn’t necessarily mean governments are accountable to their citizens. We can invent rights for ourselves and claim that the government must protect them, but that doesn’t mean that the rights are God’s way of providing accountability to the government. It may be that, in their own silly way, the United Nations was being more honest than Jefferson was. It’s nice when governments protect God-given rights, but it is not obvious that those rights Jefferson claim actually came from God.

On the other had the UDHR makes no justification as to why these rights are rights other than the fact that the General Assembly said they were.

Now that people veiw rights as governement given, what prevents the governement from suddenly redefining what your rights are. As people depart from an absolute standard in other areas of life, rights have also become subjective.

I would argue that most of the rights that show up in the Constitution and other similar documents of the time are government-given, and only government-given. In fact, many of the rights that we hold near and dear (and fight for) come from government. I think Jefferson (following Locke) overstepped the bounds of what rights are truly God-given.

Of course, when you get wording like the Universal Declaration uses, it comes across as patently absurd pretty quickly. That people even think that way can be scary.

“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…”

vs.

“The General Assembly,Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations…”

Kind of scary when you think about it. Now that people veiw rights as governement given, what prevents the governement from suddenly redefining what your rights are. As people depart from an absolute standard in other areas of life, rights have also become subjective.