I'm inclined to suspect that the move towards secularism is fundamentally an attack on the freedoms that we have hitherto enjoyed in this country. This is thrown into particularly sharp relief in the American context.
The US constitution's "self-evident" assertion is that individual sovereign rights are unalienable, precisely because these powers are assumed to derive from the "creator". In the US context, this has always been assumed to be God. Viz:
"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."Now, you take God out of the picture and suddenly, the individual has no inalienable rights. Genius. Simple. Surreptitious.
I'm not sure how this translates over to our network of constitutional instruments of nationhood but I would hazard a guess that it plays a significant role.
Related:
- George Carey: time to say that Christians have rights too - Telegraph
- ANALYSIS: Why the persecution of Christians is a key 21st century issue - The Slog
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6 comments:
Fausty: Have you read Rothbard's chapter on Locke?
http://mises.org/daily/4695
It's pretty interesting. The Founding Fathers based our constitutional republic upon the firm foundation of Lockean thought and Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.
On both sides of the pond, the idea of self-ownership, being sovereign of one's private domain, and natural rights are under assault.
The state must always reassert itself, history shows, and our founders here in the US warned us this was so.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"
Only they didn't. If you had a darker skin, you were very unequal. I've never understood how they managed to believe in both liberty and slavery at the same time.
Christianity is being eroded simply because fewer and fewer people buy into it. Complaining about it is like complaining that you can no longer buy monochrome TVs. It's dying out because people have found something better.
drsolly: The founders understood the contradiction quite well. What was the alternative? To flush a bedrock principle and simply carve in stone that we declare black people to be lesser mortals?
Thank God they based the country on this principle, while sowing the seeds for the demise of slavery. Life is messy, it too awhile, but we eventually got it right, thanks to the founders keeping "all men are created equal" in our founding document even though we contradicted that credo at our nation's birth.
The alternative? They could have said "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and slavery is no longer legal".
It's the flouting of the principle of liberty from day one of it being written down, that makes one wonder how sincere they were. And how many of the Founding Fathers were slave owners?
Anyhow - the rights of people don't derive from any particular god; if they did, we'd have to have a debate on which god to base them on, and that would be an unending argument, and some of the possible gods are quite unsavoury. Fortunately, the rights of people don't derive from any god; we give them to ourselves, because we think it's a better way to live.
I have inalienable rights, irrespective of whether there's a billion gods. Because humans have agreed amongst ourselves that we should.
The alternative? They could have said "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and slavery is no longer legal".
Had they made that stand, there would have been no United States.
It is easy to make the perfect the enemy of the good in hindsight.
We have a black president now. How about you?
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