If You Don't Believe All People Are Made In The Image of God You Will Have No Secure Basis For Asserting Equality Of Any Kind

It is rather funny, some of the things that atheists use as an excuse for hating religion, especially Christianity.   In an online brawl this weekend  one of them thought they'd come up with a solid reason for their hatred because Christians believe they are made in the image of God, as it says in Genesis.  But the same Christians hold that all people are made in God's image, including the atheists who use that as a reason to hate Christianity.  Of course atheists don't hold that all human beings are made in God's image, which led to another point in the weekend's brawls - it happens when I'm too busy to do any research.

Another atheist got really steamed when I said that liberalism was not the product of the Enlightenment, that it was a development of Jewish egalitarian justice as conveyed to a wider population through the Christian ethic of universal love, pretty much what Jurgen Habermas said.  If there's a way to get an atheist, especially a Britatheist steamed it will be to note that the Enlightenment, embodied in the writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment, was hardly enlightened.  Many if not all of the major figures of the Enlightenment were racists who held that people of African and other non-European ancestry were inferior to white people, many of them either held slaves, themselves, or supported slavery.  Voltaire was a pretty repulsive racist whose writings on the subject could be used intact in white supremacy pamphlets today.  John Locke, in writing up his constitution for the Carolinas included slavery within his unequal stratification of society.

David Hume was a racist who is credited mightily with abolitionism which, in his case, was about as weak as a cup of tea brewed from one leaf.  He was, as well, a racist whose writings wouldn't give an advocate of slavery any problems and contained much to make hay out of.

I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four orfive different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences…. [T]here are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho' low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but 'tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.

As I noted in the argument, when the escaped slave and abolitionist author David Walker was arguing rather brilliantly against almost exactly the same argument made by Thomas Jefferson, it was The Bible that he used, not David Hume. Though if he had Jefferson might have been surprised, Thomas Jefferson, despite making almost identical arguments for the inferiority and subjugation of black people, hated Hume's writing for other reasons.  Hume was hardly a liberal democrat even in his own time and on contemporary terms.  He was roundly rejected by most of the founding generation of American democracy, from the few anti-slavery figures such as John Adams to the slave holding Jefferson.

The much touted Enlighenment, as adored by intellectual atheists of the left as those vulgar materialists on the right is one of the most ridiculously overrated intellectual movements in history. Its promotion has shadowed the actual history of liberalism in the Christian writers such as the earliest advocates for the abolition of slavery and other forms of oppressive inequality.  I remember the atheist fury when that movie about the British effort to abolish slavery came out ten or more years ago when it noted that the effort was distinctly a Christian one but that is, in fact, the case as it was with the American abolition movement.   As was largely the case with the effort for women to achieve equality and for the rights of workers.  Most of those efforts were informed by The Bible they knew and not by the Enlightenment writers who they either didn't know or would have found weren't supportive of their causes.  It's been my observation that the citation of John Locke, William Blackstone, David Hume and other figures of the Enlightenment is more apt to be in favor of restoring the inequality of the late 18th century than it is in any effort to establish equal justice and an equal distribution of material wealth and such good as equality of education.  In so far as atheists try to suppress the influence of the teachings of Jesus and the radical egalitarian economic justice of the Jewish scriptures in favor of some atheist line of thinking, they are destroying the basis of liberalism in the American sense of the word in favor of the late 18th century "liberalism" which merely frees those with more power to do as they want without any regulation.

I have come to suspect that unless a society is primarily influenced by some absolute metaphysical holding that is the equivalent to the egalitarian economic and justice teachings founded in the Mosaic Law and the teachings of the Jewish prophets, they will not either achieve or sustain democracy.  I don't think anything but a holding that equality is the endowment of our Creator will be sufficient to overcome the depravity of natural selfishness.  Any society in which a majority of people do not have that sense which governs their choices and actions will be an oppressive, unequal society.  What people think leads to what they do and what they do is the substance of which a society and its character are made.  The extent to which people can deny or wiggle out of or ignore that inequality is wrong, that it is evil, that to participate in it is a sin which produces pain and disaster is the extent to which egalitarian democracy is made impossible or is destroyed.  I think that is the reason we are losing everything gained in the past two-hundred years in the United States and reverting to the country which produced the evils that liberalism exists to abolish and stop.

The proposed atheist replacements of morality, such as the current one based on an idiotic and self-contradicting evolution of morals under natural selection exacerbates instead of inhibits assumptions of inequality and all of the evils that inequality gives birth to.  The notion that natural selection, BASED ENTIRELY IN NOTIONS OF INEQUALITY  could be turned around to create equality is proof that you have to be wiling to be dishonest to try to replace morality with that.  The earliest proponents of natural selection were notable for being opposed to the idea that all people were equal, using natural selection to argue for inequality and advocating the "goodness" of even the most obviously evil practices arising from that.  I have mentioned their almost immediate assertions for the benefits of infanticide, murder of those deemed unfit, allowing them to starve and die of disease and everything up to and including imperialist genocide.  All of which I've documented in the very words of those who invented natural selection.  And the same is true for any other atheist or secular replacement for the Jewish conception of morality contained in The Law and the prophets.  There are things that could be cited, such as the morality taught by The Buddha, though it presupposes that in any generation there will be inequality as people and other beings work out their fate under karmic forces.  The same is true for various Hindu schools of thought.  While, under some of Buddhism and Hinduism there is a very high degree of morality asserted, unless there is also a call for equality within every generation then those will not produce a durable and truly egalitarian democratic government.  Such a government begins as an ideal which we will find it almost impossible to even approximate and even coming to that approximation will take enormous self-denial and self-restraint, of people doing what they would rather not do, of sacrificing their own self-interest when they could, easily, treat other people as they would not want to be treated in both small and large ways.  I think such an effort to achieve what can be takes enormous effort and anything that hampers it will be an enormous danger to it.

If there is any other proposal for producing the equivalent of the Jewish-Christian basis for egalitarian democracy, I'd very much like to know it and would support its morality as equal to it.  I suspect that it is quite possible to do so under Islam though I am not a scholar of Islam to any great extent.  Some writers calling for a society governed by the ideal equality of conduct of those making the Hajj seem to me to be calling for something like that.  Any previous faith that I had that that could be done in secular and non-theistic terms is dead.

* Update 

steve simelsDecember 28, 2015 at 11:14 AM

"Voltaire was a pretty repulsive racist whose writings on the subject could be used intact in white supremacy pamphlets today. "

Citation, please. Otherwise I'm going to assume you based that statement on the work of Prof. Otto Yerass.

It is a serious question among them whether [the Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.

Voltaire, Lettres d'Annabed

All the rest of this vast continent [of America] was shared, and still is, by small societies to whom the arts are unknown. All these peoples live in huts; they wear the skin of animals in cold climates, and go nearly naked in the temperate ones. Some feed from hunting, others on roots that they knead. They have not seeked another way of life, because one does not desire that which one does not know. Their industry has been unable to go beyond their urgent needs. Samoyèdes, Lapps, habitants of the north of Siberia, those of Kamtschatka, are even less advanced than the people of the America. Most of the Negroes, all Kaffirs, are plunged in the same stupidity, and they will stagnate a long time.

Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs

[The Jewish people] dares spread an irreconcilable hatred against all nations; it revolts against all its masters. Always superstitious, always avid of the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous, crawling in misfortune, and insolent in prosperity. Here are what were the Jews in the eyes of the Greeks and the Romans who could read their books.

Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs

If you like, I could go on.  I'm rather pressed for time as my brother is semi-conscous and I want to see him or I'd find them in the original instead of online translations.  Your Voltaire is an imaginary product of atheist propaganda, he was a total and absolute pig and a petty crook in real life, pretty much like your Charles Darwin is totally imaginary.