December 12 The Astonishing Truth That Christianity Is the Architect of Human Rights (Ideals of Good and Evil, Justice, and Compassion in Civil Society)

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.