"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."
What would a secular paraphrase of that sentence look like?
In what nonreligious terms is human equality self evident?
I was not really expecting any of the atheists, secularists, materialists, true believers in scientism to answer the challenge I issued Sunday in reaction to one of them, I knew they couldn't. If any of them would like to prove me wrong, I'm turning this into a continual challenge. They will need to actually answer those questions to prove me wrong. They will fail to answer them.
With that failure, the danger of those ideologies to any left based in egalitarian democracy is not only made clear, it will show that getting shut of them is a serious necessity. Ideologies that can't produce the equal endowment of rights will inevitably destroy any genuine left which has any chance of gaining power and maintaining it on a democratic basis.
The failure to find human rights in a form that is effectively strong and potent so as to become real in real human relationships, in socieities and in nations within those non-religious framings of what is asserted by each to comprise something called "reality" has been apparent since the advent of each of them in human culture. Without the overtly religious expression of them resorted to by Thomas Jefferson, a man who so many atheists have falsely claimed as one of their own since at least the late 19th century, it is impossible to make those claims.
And if their failure to do that in terms of discovering such rights as democracy is absolutely dependent on, their inability to discover the universal equality which real egalitarian democracy depends on is even more obvious. Even the most dedicated practitioner of the debunking of rights for other people they desire to harm or deprive of rights or ignore in inegalitarian misery are quite able to discover something like rights for themselves. Especially their rights to exploit and to harm other people as comprises so much of the mindset of Republican-fascists in the United States in 2019 and their supporters among voters.
Democracy, in every credible modern meaning of that word is either an expression of universal equality or it is bound to fall through its internal contradictions, as did the fabled Athenian democracy which so many have so stupidly taken as anything but a cautionary lesson in the dangers of aristocratic, ethnic, economic and gender privilege for those who favor democracy today.*
That is what makes those two questions posed in the post below a long postponed question for the American left which is set in opposition to Republican-fascism, since so many whose framing insists on atheism, secularism, materialism, scientism or any other ideological framing claim to constitute some more reliable form of that left. Such people, in my experience of them and in reading their own words, are quite able to allow their preferred ideological framing to override any mere emotional or habitual dedication they have to a universal dedication to rights.
I don't think they are unique in that, it is certainly what is universally true on the right, even among those whose ideological framing is not atheistic or may even be secularist, indeed, it's clear that for a large percentage of those who self-identify as "evangelical" that they are as dedicated to the most extreme forms of inequality and the denial of rights as the most ardent of Stalinists and Maoists are, as the dedicated materialists** must be if the questions of rights and the devotee to Darwinian natural selection must be because they hold inequality is the very engine of evolutionary progress, equality imposed by human choice, the very subtance of democracy being transformed by that scientific ideology into an engine of dysgenicis - read the literature if you don't believe me, you'll find it even in the post-WWII period. Years ago, here and on other blogs I wrote for I pointed out the irony that the most fundamentalists of Darwinian deniers of equality in the United States were to be found among those who most ardently denied the fact of evolution, who held the name of Charles Darwin in greatest disdain.
* And it must be an equal right to a decent life. It cannot be the universal equality of misery and inhumanity that the devotees of aristocratically imposed austerity and Marxism both enact. That degraded equality will always guarantee that elites will destroy any such equality. Just about every Marxist hell of the twentieth century named themselves as "democratic republics" even as all of them were lorded over by strong men gangsters at the head of an elite of crooks. What would seem to be almost the universal evolution of countries that had been so damaged by communism is into ultra-capitalist gangster regimes, not the placid stateless paradises that Marx hallucinated, should also be a warning of where scientistic materialism leads.
** Materialists, from my reading of them, including those who claim the title "free thinkers" are compelled by their ideology and their need to destroy any concept that implies a non-material consciousness
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