Reason #12 The Evidence That Christianity Is the Architect of Human Rights (Ideals of Good and Evil, Justice, and Compassion in Civil Society)
Logic and the facts of history strongly indicate that the Christian faith, not atheism or other world religions, deserves the credit for being the true impetus behind our current conceptions of foundational human rights.
The grand guiding principles
of human civilization revolve around the ideas of justice, compassion, the
“inalienable rights” of every person, the equality of all people, and the
inherent worth of each person, rich or poor, male or female, young or old,
black or white, able-bodied or disabled—everyone.
And because ideas have consequences (and bad ideas have victims), these foundational principles of society have served as a mighty protective force, for many millions of people, against oppression of every kind.
Where then did these grand ideas come from? If they
come from atheistic presuppositions, or from Eastern religions, then we should
give credit where credit is due and devote ourselves to atheism, Hinduism, or
Buddhism. But, of course, these liberating ideas don’t come from atheism or the
Far East. They come from the religion of Jesus.
There is a stark and
striking contrast between Jesus’ core ideas and the core ideas of atheism and
other religions, and all these core ideas come with predictable consequences.
Jesus taught that you
must “treat others as you wish them to
treat you…love your neighbor…love your enemies…turn the other cheek…and go the
extra mile.” Atheists teach us that: “The universe has no design, no purpose,
no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference” (atheist Richard
Dawkins), and that “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” (atheist Ingrid Newkirk
of PETA).
Beginning with the idea that humans are just accidents of nature—accidentally
combined chemicals sharing a common origin with any ordinary drop of water, cabbage,
or reptile, we must also then conclude that there can never really be such a thing
as justice or evil. Salt water cannot be evil, and there’s no such thing as an
evil cabbage. Neither is a large python evil for eating a smaller python. In
fact, “a rat is a boy,” and sometimes rats must be exterminated.
The “accident of nature” premise of atheism would never lead a
population to believe in the equal worth and rights of every individual (see
also Reason #10). Oppositely, it could only lead to the belief that it is only
sensible for pythons to eat other pythons if the right opportunity arises. It
would logically lead to belief in a tooth-and-claw survival of the fittest, and
in the benefits of acting opportunistically. Even recent world history bears
this out with records of entire nations which have curtailed the human rights
of those whom they came to regard as “useless eaters” or “human lives unworthy
of life.”
Therefore, atheism (with
its random electro-chemical view of human beings), and other religions (with
their notions of Karma, and notions of plants and humans being equally divine) have
no way to account for their belief in the “equality” of all people,
“inalienable rights,” and the value of every human life. It is clear that they
have plagiarized these ideas from the Christian faith and then shamefully
refused to give the Christian faith credit for them.
Metaphorically
speaking, non-Christian humanitarians have a sort of “carjacker” worldview. A
carjacker is found driving a car not
registered to him—a car that has the real owner’s fingerprints and possessions
all over it—and he himself has no way to account for how he ever came to be
driving such a car as the one he is now driving.
Kindly atheists are intellectual carjackers.
They speak and look like Christians in so many ways, but they cannot account
for their beliefs in the ethical defectiveness of theft, rape, slave-trading,
etc. They themselves say that their universe has “no design, no purpose, no
evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
In fact,
the atheist’s worldview, when he can bring himself to be loyal to it, inspires
him to come to the defense of so-called evildoers who simply behave as
chemicals naturally do. Since the atheist does not consider rape or theft in
the animal kingdom to be evil, he has no reason to argue that these are evil in
the case of human animals.
Now, if
the kindly atheist doesn’t defend evil or, more accurately, doesn’t deny even the
possibility of evil in an electro-chemical world but, instead, spends his days
preaching “love thy neighbor,” we should ask ourselves how he ever arrived at
that high ethical standard which stands in direct opposition to his stated
worldview. What pitiless chemicals taught him to think such a kind thought as
that?
To
restate the atheistic dilemma plainly, a survival-of-the-fittest scheme can
certainly account for the frightening sexual aggression of a male baboon towards
the females in his troop, and for the mob violence of chimpanzees against one
another, but it can never account for any sort of moral objection to these same
behaviors in humans.
In fact,
naturalism’s “red in tooth and claw” worldview should inspire logically
consistent atheists to defend sexual predation and turf wars. And we must remind
our atheist friends that this is exactly what their atheistic brethren in
Joseph Stalin’s regime did when they murdered 65 million of their own
countrymen in a turf dispute, and what their brothers in Chairman Mao’s
atheistic regime did when they murdered 35 million of their own countrymen.
But if
instead of taking his cues from nature, as he should, a nice atheist goes about
preaching “do unto others as you would have them do to you,” we should ask
ourselves how his own “survival-of-the-fittest-electrochemical” worldview ever
drove him to such puritanical convictions about universal human worth, good,
evil, justice, and compassion for the underdog.
Clearly,
these kindly atheists, nurtured by our Western culture, actually learned these
lofty ideals from others—from the teaching that is traced all the way back to
the One who taught us, not survival of the fittest, but that the stronger have
a special obligation to take care of the weak.*
The
foundational premises of atheism and other world religions would never lead us
to believe that every human life is valuable, equally valuable with every other
human life, and far more valuable than any plant or animal life. When these
ideas are promoted by atheists and other religions, they are being plagiarized
from the Christian faith.
Logic and the facts of history strongly indicate that the Christian faith, not atheism or other world religions, deserves the credit for being the true impetus behind our current conceptions of foundational human rights.
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