/lit/ - Literature

Human Rights: A Relatively New Idea

History teaches us that until recently, people operated under a very different moral code. In the barbarian world, the weak were exploited by the strong and enslaved by the powerful. Ancient Rome provides an example. Citizens believed that neither the poor nor the weak had intrinsic value, which is why Caesar was able to kill one million Gauls and enslave a million more. It’s also why Roman infants were routinely abandoned like Moses in the baby basket. To the modern mind, these actions are repugnant.

For that, we have to credit Christianity. The historian Tom Holland has called it the “most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history.” Religious or not, every Westerner bathes in the waters of Christian ideology. Those droplets are born from Christ’s insistence that every human is a child of God and the way St. Paul urged people to “welcome one another” across all social and ethnic barriers. Until recently, in Europe, to be human was to be a believer and to be a believer was to be Christian. Yes, we credit the Greeks for shaping our view of the good life. But even they were interpreted through a Christian lens. Aristotle through Aquinas, Plato through St. Augustine.

We are desensitized to Christianity’s influence on Western thought not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s so all-consuming. Consider this: the coordinates of time and space are both measured in reference to Christ. The year at the top of every calendar denotes the number of years since Christ was born. When it comes to space, “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified.

Our mainstream notion of human rights is also a byproduct of Christianity. Human rights exist in their modern form because the Bible says that every person is made in the image of God—imago dei. In turn, each person is granted unalienable rights, and those rights can’t be taken away. But the contract breaks down if human beings aren’t special. If humans are in the same category of every other animal, there is no intellectual scaffolding to uphold either human rights or the legal equality of man. Appealing to human rights just because we say so is as baseless as appealing to astrology or the will of Zeus. Even if a group of people can agree on how to treat people in the moment, consensus can change at any moment. Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion.

Without the word of God, all we have are opinions. Morality and justice are downgraded from indisputable truths to mere preferences and shared fictions. Both of those can change on a whim. In a world of one person’s word against another, the most powerful person will control the moral landscape. This problem is one of the central themes of Dostoyevsky’s writing: in an 1878 letter, he asked why he should live righteously in a world without a god. Assuming that there is no afterlife and that the police wouldn’t catch him after a wrongdoing, he asks: “Why shouldn’t I cut another man’s throat, rob, and steal?”

Today, our answer boils down to human rights. To Dostoevsky’s point, without the hand of God to shape human morality, many people will conclude that the benefits of a righteous life aren’t worth the costs. In theory, we could base our belief in human rights on rationality and the mutual agreement that some actions are better than others. Maybe one day, people will worship the United Nations’ Human Rights charter like they worship the Bible today. Doing so would take us away from the woo-woo of religion and towards the rigor of secular reason, where we can logically discern the differences between good and evil. But in practice, no matter how much we’d like it to be otherwise, an objective and unchanging belief in human rights can be justified by faith and faith alone.

Though the intrinsic worth of every person is a keystone of Western morality, Christianity’s influence has been stripped out of the narrative. At the time of this writing, the Wikipedia page about human rights doesn’t even mention Christianity.

Blah blah blah. Go to /his/, retard. Saged it!

Maybe it’s because, as a post-Enlightenment society, we crave scientific explanations for our beliefs. But neither the laws of physics nor the principles of chemistry can serve as a foundation for human rights. In the language of David Hume, science can tell us how the world is, but not how it ought to be. Philosophy can’t save human rights either. Immanuel Kant argued that humans deserve special respect because they are rational creatures, and therefore, ends in themselves. But that argument has problems too. Why should we only respect rational beings? And as individuals, are humans only as worthy as they are rational?

One reason we underestimate how much Christianity has influenced our thinking is that we’ve removed religious education from our schools. The same people who tout the virtues of being well-read skip right past the Bible, the most popular book in human history. To my amazement, I made it through 16 years of schooling without ever reading the Gospels. That thinking continues into adulthood, where we’ll binge-read biographies about some hot new tech CEO while skipping the one about the most important figure in Western history: Jesus Christ.

Recognizing the Influence of Religion

I’m not saying that we should force people to be religious. After all, I’m a tepid non-believer myself. But being secular doesn’t give you a hall pass to ignore your Christian influences. We should study religion not to dogmatically accept faith, but to understand the foundations of our worldview. As we do, we should ask ourselves: “Is Christianity true?” And if you think it’s bogus, then: “Why do I let these ideas influence my worldview so strongly?”

Even humanism, which prides itself on a kind of rationality that can only be achieved without the dogmas of religion, was seeded inside the soil of Christian ideas. Given that, it’s no coincidence that all the biggest international humanist conferences (except one) take place in cities inside of Christian countries: Oxford, London, Oslo, Washington D.C., Brussels, Hannover, London, Mumbai, Boston, Paris, and Amsterdam. If you investigate the intellectual lineage of humanism, you’ll see how it grew out of the seeds of Christ and how they were nurtured with the teachings of the Bible.

Ever since the Enlightenment, the march of intellectual progress has followed the compass of empiricism. Intellectuals in particular have tried to silence religious explanations for the creation of the world, and the decline of religious affiliation shows that their ideas are catching on. Look, I get it. The “Man in the Sky” idea of God seems ancient. Comical, even. Centering your life around a book written 2,000 years ago seems like the antithesis of progress. Even if old ideas tend to stick around because they’re true or useful, embracing all those old Biblical philosophies is lunacy in our fast-changing world. But something about this argument is unsatisfying.

Cafeteria Christianity

Some intellectuals have tried to navigate this conundrum by becoming Cafeteria Christians. It’s like they’re at a hotel buffet, where they can take the foods that look appetizing and reject the rest. Cafeteria Christians want to adopt the most useful parts of the tradition and reject everything else.

This a-la-carte philosophy isn’t new. It’s what Thomas Jefferson did two centuries ago when he wrote the Jefferson Bible. Specifically, he reduced the Bible into a self-help book by removing all the miracles but keeping the sound life advice. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose theology without becoming a slave to intellectual fashions or destroying the integrity of those ideas in the first place.

Knowing that, some intellectuals have kept the New Testament intact but embraced a metaphorical interpretation of it. When this “spiritual, but not religious” crowd compliments religion, they do it backhandedly. Religion is a “useful lie,” they say. The argument goes like this: Even if religious ideas aren’t literally true, the world is a safer and more prosperous place when we buy into them. Thus, we should deceive ourselves and become religious even though — wink, wink — it’s false.

They justify this worldview with empirical data. For example, one study found that attending weekly religious services raises people’s happiness as much as moving from the bottom quartile of income to the top. Moreover, doubling their rate of religious attendance raises their income by nine percent. Another study found that the percentage of Americans who rated their mental health as “excellent” fell for everybody except those who attended a religious service in the past week. Under this belief system, religious ideas are worthy not because they’re true, but because they make us happier and more successful. If so, religion is, indeed, the opiate of the masses.

The problem is that you can’t just pick certain ideas from the buffet if you want to be intellectually honest.

Intellectual Honesty

The atheist scholar Christopher Hitchens was once interviewed by a unitarian minister who called herself a “Liberal Christian.” Though she identifies as a Christian, she doesn’t believe Jesus died for her sins. Instead, she reads the scripture metaphorically. Hitchens, who was one of Christianity’s fiercest critics, responded by saying: “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

Echoing Hitchens’ point, Christianity is unique among religions because it has a self-destruct mechanism. The book of I Corinthians says that the truth of Christianity hinges upon the resurrection’s historical reality — meaning that the story of Christ dying on the cross and coming back to life must be literally true. So if you discover that Christ was not raised, you should stop being Christian. End of story. Specifically, the text says: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile… Those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Others say that Christ was a brilliant teacher, but not the son of God. Appealing as that argument sounds, C.S. Lewis critiqued this perspective half a century ago. He argued that you can’t accept him as a great moral teacher without also accepting his claim to be God. Since Jesus’ claims were so outlandish, he couldn’t have been just a great moral teacher. You must take a stand. Christ was either the Son of God or a madman. Lewis writes: “You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.”

Though I find myself doing it all the time, thinking of religion metaphorically instead of literally is problematic. Christianity, and therefore the moral underpinnings of the West, is long-term stable to the extent that enough people believe in all that Christ claimed to be and the literal truth of his story. Ultimately, a religious affiliation built upon metaphors instead of hard truths is a worldview that’ll crumble under the weight of scrutiny.

The Many Buckets of Faith

I have a confession to make: I’ve spent my entire life in this metaphorical camp. Growing up, I attended a Jewish school where I took 40 minutes of both Hebrew and Biblical studies every day. But as early as elementary school, I thought I was above religious thinking. I “knew” that Moses didn’t actually part the Red Sea and didn’t ascend Mount Sinai to have an actual conversation with God. All that sounded as counterfeit as the tooth fairy. Even as I sang the Torah portion during my Bar Mitzvah to a crowd of a couple hundred friends and family members, I rejected the teachings I was chanting. Only after college did I discover that the ideas I passionately rejected, particularly the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments, were the bedrock of my moral philosophy.

Not just mine, all my friends too — and we didn’t even know it. In retrospect, that’s why we strive to treat disabled people with dignity and it’s why sentences like this one from a government official inspire head-nodding agreement: “A city is measured by how it treats the least of its brothers and sisters. That’s what we all believe, that’s what we’ve grown up believing, and it’s who we are.” We agree with these ideas because Christianity is the invisible frame around modern thought. These moral conclusions are shaped by the Beatitudes where Christ instructs us to bless the poor, the meek, and the persecuted. Until Christ, those blessings were reserved for the rich and powerful.

I call people in this group “Religious Atheists.”

As a member of this tribe, I don’t have a problem with the conclusions. I have a problem with the ignorance caused by the blind dismissal of religion, and the way they mock the assumptions that underpin their worldview. This group of Religious Atheists is the fastest-growing religious group in America. In 2000, almost 70% of Americans considered themselves to be a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque. In just two decades, that number has fallen to below 50%. It’s a group of people who want Christianity without Christ. They want community without communion, the kingdom without the king, and like Thomas Jefferson, morals without miracles.

Again—I’m a member of this group. My worldview rests on two contradictory axioms: I don’t believe in the resurrection of Christ, but I passionately believe in human rights. I’m pulled towards agnosticism because I don’t have enough evidence to be a believer. Deep down, I’ve chosen to remain an agnostic because the existence of God is beyond my comprehension. Asking me about God’s presence is like asking an ant what I should order at In-N-Out Burger. The sentence doesn’t compute. Further, the idea that the son of God was born of a virgin, traveled through contemporary Israel performing miracles, died on a cross, and came back to life seems as bizarre to me today as it did to the Romans two millennia ago. And yet, the intellectual history of Western civilization orbits around this story.

But because of my commitment to human rights, I’m implicitly committed to Christian ideas—or at the very least, a moral philosophy that’s propped up by the Bible. And it’s not just me. American law and culture are thoroughly Christian too. Though I’m closer to an atheist than a believer, I shiver at the nihilistic conclusions of a world without God. One where morality follows intellectual fashion and leaders rule by the cold calculus of Excel spreadsheets. That, in turn, has opened my ears to the truth of Judeo-Christian teachings.

As for my religious odyssey, I’m still not sure where I’ll end up. I know I want to live critically, which starts with an examination of my worldview. I don’t want to follow in the footsteps of my friends, who’ve ignored the influence of religious ideas on the making of the Western Mind, not to mention my teachers, who didn’t stop to investigate the words “self-evident” when they taught the Declaration of Independence.

Their actions don’t square up with their beliefs. They don’t believe in God because there’s no empirical reason to believe in him. But at the same time, they believe in human rights, which can be justified only by the very God they don’t believe in. They also can’t explain what makes human beings special or why the value of a human life should transcend cultural boundaries. Ultimately, there are two ways to justify a belief in human rights: you can either construct a bottom-up, rational argument, or you can surrender to the supreme word of God.

Please visit https://writeofpassage.school/ to learn how to effectively think and write for the internet.

>>21400591
If you would like to debate any of the points I made in this essay, by all means do.

This bitch keeps dipping his toes in the based alt-right but is afraid of alienating the normie clients who populate his silly writing class.

MODS

Just link next time goddamn.

>>21400581
OK, C.S Jewish

>In other words: If you believe in human rights but don’t believe in God, you need a logical explanation for why they’re self-evident.

Because I don't like mine being taken away, so I won't take other's rights away

Wait, is this it? 'You need Christianity because [shitty reason that doesn't actually require a belief in Christianity]'?

Oh well, here's a pity-ngmi

>>21400984
this

>>21401001
This guy fancies himself a serious thinker too.

>>21401001
>I don't like mine being taken away, so I won't take other's rights away

non sequitur

>>21400581
Stop larping.

>>21401001
But, on this seemingly simple solution, we have to ask why there are so many humans who would take up arms against a state where humans were battery farmed and eaten, but few take up arms against the battery farming of chickens? You’ve probably given money to charity as some point, but have you ever given even a piece of bread to an ant colony? Obviously there is some criteria that you use to determine the amount of rights a creature is owed. If it’s based on similarity to yourself, we clearly have a justification for racism (which may or may not be unpalatable to you). If it’s based on intellectual capabilities, why can’t I enslave the stupid?
What I’m trying to express as clearly as I can is that morality is based on intuition and not reason, and if you need to reinforce your moral position you’re going to have to rely on divine fiat or similar.

>>21401141
Christians outing themselves as psychopaths

Did this dude really just advertise on /lit/?

>>21400581
>reddit spacing
>>21400613
>They want community without communion, the kingdom without the king, and like Thomas Jefferson, morals without miracles.
This line is pure gold.

>>21400581
Reminder that all Christians irl support blacks, trannies and other woke shit and the "christians" on this site are just using it to justify their hate and bigotry as a last resort now that alt right, neo nazism, trumpism etc have all failed miserably

>>21401001
>Because I don't like mine being taken away, so I won't take other's rights away
I disagree, it's better for me if your rights are taken away and I have no fear of your reprisal since you're obviously an emasculated soi creature who will never fight back. Now what sweetie?

>>21401308
>Christians irl support blacks,
Yes.
> trannies
As people yes, for their ideas no.
> and other woke shit
No.
> and the "christians" on this site are just using it to justify their hate and bigotry as a last resort
What about Christianity is hateful?
> now that alt right, neo nazism, trumpism etc have all failed miserably
Uh huh

>>21400617
To really move beyond this mindset I'd check out the questions Christ asked in particular and I would also maybe consider speaking with a priest. Moreover, I would consider something odd - is the fight to hide Christianity? To scrub over it and God-wash our society a coordinated effort without explicit coordination? Ironically, the proof for Christ's divinity can also be seen in that the ignorant often hate or ignore Him and the secular world totally hides Him but because things which do not coordinate can accidentally coordinate there must be an oppositional force, i.e. a supernatural oppositional force.

>>21401207
because we're human and they're animals

>>21401296
>This line is pure gold.

Is it though?

>>21400617
>an objective and unchanging belief in human rights can be justified by faith and faith alone
Why? You've scarcely mentioned the alternatives, let alone argued against them. I certainly hope that you don't mean to say that "objective and unchanging" is equivalent to the "dogmatic acceptance of faith" you paint negatively only a couple paragraphs later.

>you can't pick and choose theology without becoming a slave to intellectual fashions or destroying the integrity of those ideas
Why not? If a religion teaches plenty of good things, but also that there's a theological fact which implies you should slaughter every fifth baby to avoid the Curse of Fives, is it not reasonable to reform the theology to get rid of the bad part? If society is not yet ready for such a reform, is it not reasonable to refrain from it yourself, while practicing the other tenets of the religion, and to convey this idea to the community?

>the part about Hitchens
Who says Hitchens gets to dictate who is and is not a Christian?

>the part about I Corinthians
Claiming that this is a canonical and necessary fact of Christianity hinges on the assumption that Word of Paul is absolutely true. You don't believe Jesus was resurrected, so why this?

>the part about C.S. Lewis
Your quote only shows that he disagrees with the claim, not any actual argument against it.

>two contradictory axioms
You have absolutely failed to explain why these are contradictory. You seem to be wrestling with a false dilemma, an all-or-nothing idea about Christianity, imagining that you cannot hold any moral ideas associated with Christianity without going all-in and insisting that everything in the Bible is literally true. You are allowed to have nuanced beliefs. Please consider having nuanced beliefs in the future.

>>21401360
So it's based on similarity, and morality is inherently subjective? If a hypothetical alien arrived on our planet, it would have no moral imperative to respect our 'human rights' and we would have no moral imperative to allow it any rights in turn? I'm not saying you're wrong, I fully believe that morality is nothing more than the manifestation of in-group mentality.

>>21400581
But OP, many people aren't whigs. Talk to an ontological essentialist: a fascist. Talk to a praxic Marxist: collective self-interest or inevitable systems theories.

Whiggery gets you nowhere son.

This reads like it was written by AI

>"I have a confession to make: I'm Jewish."
You know, you're not — and that's the problem. The Bible says in Romans 2, Revelation 2, Revelation 3, Philippians 3, and Galatiabs 3, among other places, that you're not Jews. You are fake Jews. By continuing to force your language on us, you're contradicting our fundamental beliefs.

>>21401374
Politest mic drop ever.

>>21401001
>I don't like mine being taken away, so I won't take other's rights away
>Matthew 7:12
So the golden rule huh?

Bump. This shit is gold.

>>21400605
>The atheist scholar Christopher
What an unfortunate name

Honestly, you over-generalize far too frequently and the tone of your writing is glib.

>>21400610
>rejected the teachings I was chanting. Only after college did I discover that the ideas I passionately rejected, particularly the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments, were the bedrock of my moral philosophy.
>Not just mine, all my friends too — and we didn’t even know it. In retrospect, that’s why we strive to treat disabled people with dignity and it’s why
Did the native americans treat their disabled poorly? Where's the evidence that the bible invented morals, as you seem to be claiming?

>>21400595
>To my amazement, I made it through 16 years of schooling without ever reading the Gospels. That thinking continues into adulthood, where we’ll binge-read biographies about some hot new tech CEO while skipping the one about the most important figure in Western history: Jesus Christ.
Yeah, because the world system has no choice but to take the truths of God's word and then create a counterfeit godless version. People are intellectually dishonest and just do things to fit in with everyone else, so the closet satanists are able to wrangle most people into going along with a counterfeit set of "human rights" that is nothing more than a ripoff and corrupted version of what natural God-given rights actually are. That is, they try to emulate and "shoplift" the good of what's in God's word but then create a blind spot where they don't even see or recognize where it all originally comes from - because they want to take credit for all of it themselves. So they try to strip God out of it, and then just use intellectual dishonesty to lead people away from ever finding out or discovering this fact. They've rewritten history into a new "woke" narrative that erases all inconvenient facts. But it doesn't matter because all of their efforts will fail in the end. The self evident truths are true, and the God that gave us these things in the first place is still active. (The fact that anything exists establishes that assertion.) Satanists can resist and fight, do all kinds of gymnastics, try to hide from the truth, try to hide the truth from others, and even kill us for being the message-bearers of the truth, but it is just going to be ultimately pointless because of what they are going against. It leads to a more spectacular fall for them if they decide not to repent. As for the people of God -- to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

The button is located here guys

Don't forget to sage! (:

>>21400581
Dumbest essay I’ve read in a while. Is this really the best Christcucks have to offer?

>>21401474
This

>>21403324
What annoys me is that at a glance he’s not even Christian

>>21403319
Don’t be a little bitch boy. Tearing this dude’s writing has been a blast.

Didn't read; Not selling

>>21401266
Many such cases!

>>21401001
The truth is in your heart but you still don’t believe

newfag here
who tf is sage
wtf does it mean to sage

>>21404769
It allows you to reply to a thread without bumping the post up. Cowards and Karen use it. Just makes you look like you care too much.

>>21404781
thanks anon!

>>21404802
wait, now i think i got it!

I know it’s fashionable to shit on successful and positive people, but David’s course (Write of Passage) changed my life. I’ve now got a successful online content creating business and was able to leave my 9-5. He’s a fucking awesome thinker, teacher, and “thought leader.”

>>21404860
Fuck off with the shilling David

>>21400581
Actually I liked your essay, good job OP

>>21400590
>Without the word of God, all we have are opinions.
Not really, homosexuality would still be a vice, because sexually transmitted diseases benefit no society, they create suffering, equally if you care about leaving a legacy and living in a healthy society, then you would have to stop some forms of sexual degeneracy when they affect the family. Christians in the past based on Aristotle knew how to apply natural law and since we life in a world with some basic natural laws and some basic consequences for certains actions, some morals are universal.

>>21400584
>In the barbarian world, the weak were exploited by the strong and enslaved by the powerful. Ancient Rome provides an example. Citizens believed that neither the poor nor the weak had intrinsic value,
Not exactly true, the poor received bread and games, because their political support was needed.

>>21404860
i remember a tweet from that justin dude that was smtn along the lines of "i hate fatherhood and being a father because i dont have time to smoke weed with friends anymore"

>>21404974
I second this.

Thanks for all the free advertising, haters :D My web traffic is off the chain!

>>21402246
No, more like Hammurabi's code, that biblical morality is based off of

>>21401318
That would create the precedent that that's apparently okay, which means it's only a matter of time before this is done onto you

>>21405374
>haters
This word is only ever used by people nobody cares about

>>21405452
You sound like a wagie hater. Please join my next Write of Passage cohort. Might give you a promo code for 10% off.

>>21405771
eat shit retard
nothing you've said is new or worth profiting from

>>21405796
I profit quite handsomely.

>>21405437
It had already exist before discovery.

>>21400581
Write an essay on why I'm a Platonist, and consequently why I don't believe in human rights yet still believe in the good.

Could someone kill this thread so I can stop seeing this dude’s face?

>>21400581
jesus is caesarion you dumb nigger kill yourself

>>21400581
>Becoming an educated citizen starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs
>This is the most famous sentence in America’s Declaration of Independence
>History teaches us that until recently, people operated under a very different moral code.
>Our mainstream notion of human rights is also a byproduct of Christianity.
>Ever since the Enlightenment, the march of intellectual progress has followed the compass of empiricism.
I jumped around and read the opening lines to the paragraphs. It's some of the most cringe pretentious shit I've seen. You just jerked yourself off and showed everyone. I'm embaressed for you.

>>21406771
>unitarian logo is a fucking leaf

>>21400581
>John Locke,
> Human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights
>The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights. To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible
That's three unsubstantiated logical leaps, but the latter "bible" is the largest one; you equate the concept of a god with the abramic religion of jewish racial supremacism,

i.e. if I say I believe in XYZ which happens to feature the idea of a god, you decide that I've validated jewish racial supremaciam, because I used the word 'god'.

Locke, a church of england humanist, was like all English during those times,violently opposed to Papism and its various sacraments; much like the American Founding Fathers, and it's worth mentioning at this time that Catholicism was outlawed in the English-speaking parts of the world.

>This creates cognitive dissonance for secular people who advocate for human rights.
No, the thing is a false-equation or confaulation on your part designed to bolster your own peculiar ideology; where you say "if you don't agree with what i say, you cannot have human rights," however the weakness of this position is self-evident - especially in this last century - to base the notion of "rights" on something intangible (i.e. a political fantasy vs. something we can measure or agree upon, like economic production and citizenship) opens those "rights" up to being abused; e.g. the christians were unable to make a case against or argue for things like universal suffrage, drug prohibition or legalization, abortion, etc. because the basis they used to argue 'from' was intangible.

>In other words: If you believe in human rights but don’t believe in God, you need a logical explanation for why they’re self-evident.

Easy,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal (when they are born they are helpless babies who know nothing, and they begin a process of learning from the influences and environment around them which determines who they are when you encounter them later on).”

You're injecting a specific religious meaning into that observation by a confabulation of the term 'create', to implying abramic creation story; adam and eve, etc.

It's worth mentioning that the statement "all men created equal" contradicts the doctrine of those religions which highlight clear racial differences, superiority of one, inferiority of another: gentiles not being real humans, black people being cursed because of seeing Lots anus as he lay drunk, etc. From a religious basis, this religion anyway, there is no 'equality' to speak of, hence the need during those centuries to violently eliminate religion.

confaulation
*confabulation

>>21406771
Some of those are not at all dsaying the same thing.

>>21401266
more non sequitur

OP there are two central issues to human rights sans religious force. (1) They are mere abstractions, with no actual force in the world, so they are irrelevant if you ignore them; (2) even if they existed, they only serve to strip us of our freedom (since they are imperatives, which are what imperatives do by nature, dictate what people are allowed to do), turning us into a kind of robot, which contradicts us having 'dignity' to begin with; and (3) that 'value' or 'worth' is not a thing that can inherently exist in objects, is not a property of objects (what is the shape or form of a right?) so people cannot have inherent 'dignity' whatsoever. In the latter (3), notice that if you claim you have "a right" to X, I could just as reasonably argue I have "two rights" to X; and since neither of us can actually SHOW what a right looks and feels like, there is no way to prove who has more of a right, you or I. Rights are rightfully called a 'spook' by Stirner for a reason. And as Nietzsche rightly put: "There are no moral facts, only moral interpretations."

>>21408703
Its not self-evident people are 'created equal'. If it were, you had find it impossible to distinguish your mother from your father. Clearly they are not the same person. So people are not self-evidently the same. And even in WORTH they cannot be the same, since if they were, they would be replaceable with each other. You could replace your dad with someone else and you would've just as likely have been born. This is also clearly not true. So neither in worth are mother and father equal.

>>21408942
we have different shapes and purposes, but existentially we are all equally human

>>21408942
>Its not self-evident people are 'created equal'. If it were, you had find it impossible to distinguish your mother from your father. Clearly they are not the same person. So people are not self-evidently the same.
...um.. no, you just swapped out the word 'Men' with the words 'people, persons,' this wasn't what was said or what was meant at the time either.

In aim it's leveled against King George III, saying "you have no right to dictate to us, as we are all Gentlemen," with George as the classic rex tyrannis (misruling his kingdom) giving rise to republican necessity.

>>21408982
So we're the member of the same species? This does not make us the same, only of the same abstract category. So therefore, we are still not equal.
>>21408984
>...um.. no, you just swapped out the word 'Men' with the words 'people, persons,
This is semantics. At heart, there's never been a formal, rigorous demonstration of human equality. Equality has always been a political term, not a philosophical or meaningful one. It is not meant to have a rigorous meaning other than "He was what I don't. That's not fair."

>>21409098
>This is semantics
oh jesus not this again.. Yes, this is what you did when you swapped "men" for "people" and changed the meaning of the sentence in order to respond to it.. now you're projecting your actions back onto me.

> Equality has always been a political term, not a philosophical or meaningful one. It is not meant to have a rigorous meaning other than "He was what I don't. That's not fair."
ehh perhaps. The word, anyway, comes from the Roman Republic where the 'eques' (knights) were recruited from local barbarian (greek, libyan, german) aristocracies because they were considered to be "equals to (the romans)", but beyond this, what you say here,
>"He was what I don't. That's not fair."
is largely correct in its modern context; it's worth recalling that the democracies of greece and even the ancient britons did not possess this concept of 'equality' in the modern context; being slave owning societies and so on.

But anyway it sounds like you want to reply to something that nobody said, as you changed the words around to alter the meaning.

>>21409342
The meaning remained the same, whether you use men or people. Hence semantics. Saying "all men are created equal" vs "all people are created equal", there's no real difference. They are both retarded statements, not self-evident at all.

>>21408709
They are, introspection is needed to understand why. We are all from the same Source.

>>21409342
>>21409410
PLEASE LET THIS SHILL THREAD DIE. PLEASE.

>>21409410
>The meaning remained the same, whether you use men or people.
holy shit, it's completely different; compare any use of a similar thing:
"we observe that brambles thrive in ditches," is not the same as "we observe all plants thrive in ditches,"

As I said, anyway, it's "gentlemen" they're talking about, not everybody in general,
>not self-evident at all.
it's quite self-evident in the context of a declaration of independence from a monarch who is declared 'very much superior' by his own birth or his creation; as: contrarily to his claim of authority by accident of birth, "all men are created equal" and the divinity claims of monarchs is patently false.

I think, really, since we've moved past divine reverence of, say, a random man with a baked beans can on his head, this point becomes less and less clear over time.

>>21410025
>I think, really, since we've moved past divine reverence of, say, a random man with a baked beans can on his head, this point becomes less and less clear over time.
one day i would not be surprised if we woke up to find people thought this was referring to negros.

ba
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>>21410025
Men is being used in a generic sense in the declaration. Sure, the context may mean 'gentlemen', but that's not how its read today, and that's not how rights and equality is spoken about today, and for good reason. To say 'gentlemen' is to already assume their value as being somehow important. They as well have written "We, who are gentlemen, so equal to the king (debatably) due to that importance, are all equal." It further makes the statement a joke. They need to assume a lot about themselves just to make equality work, and it still doesn't.
>it's quite self-evident in the context of a declaration of independence from a monarch who is declared 'very much superior' by his own birth or his creation
This still does not make it self-evident. The members who wrote the declaration are still all quite different people, or 'gentlemen' lets call them. No equality is demonstrated. It is really just a bold bogus claim to give themselves the motivation to leave england behind.

>>21410265
>They as well have written "We, who are gentlemen, so equal to the king (debatably) due to that importance, are all equal." It further makes the statement a joke.
hahaha well at least you udnerstand what I'm saying, we disagree obviously. But I think it's important to highlight that we 'can' understand and disagree primarily because we are equals in this precise sense.

>but that's not how its read today
doesn't matter in the least. Everything is context, especially things that come to form legal definitions.

>>21410390
>But I think it's important to highlight that we 'can' understand and disagree primarily because we are equals in this precise sense.
>Set A and Set B both have 1 in it, so A and B are equals in having a 1 in it.
We have similarities, of course, to every animal and object on the planet.

>>21410445
Fair point.

The response to this essay has been misguided. It’s actually surprisingly brilliant.

>>21400581
not american so my ideqs arent christian as you said
such ideas existed before judeo-christianianity and in places without influence of judeo-christianian worldview

also the equality that is stated is equality before the law and government
men arent equal and never were
idea of equality is wrong

>>21401001
>Because I don't like mine being taken away, so I won't take other's rights away
I don't like mine being taken away, and therefore I must take yours away. No tolerance for the intolerant.