/lit/ - Literature

Thought the “thinkers” of 4chan might enjoy this perspective.

Why You’re Christian
Becoming an educated citizen starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs. For example, look at this iconic line from one of America’s founding documents:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

This is the most famous sentence in America’s Declaration of Independence. It’s the driving intellectual force behind the nation’s constitutional belief in legal equality. Educated citizens base their commitment to American ideals on it. This commitment shows up in our theories of democracy, in which each citizen has an equal vote, and our justice system, in which all humans are supposedly equal under the law.

But there’s a problem: human equality isn’t self-evident at all.

John Locke, whose intellectual ink is tattooed all over the Declaration of Independence, knew this. His theory of natural rights is based on the idea that God owns us as property. Human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted. The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights. To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible as on the writings of Enlightenment thinkers. Even our most “rational” beliefs are downstream of religious thinking.

This creates cognitive dissonance for secular people who advocate for human rights. While they might not realize it, nine times out of ten, they’ve unconsciously inherited a belief in human rights and are unaware of the foundational ideas which underpin that belief. So now, they’re faced with a head-scratching dilemma: one of their central beliefs — human rights — is self-evident only if God says so.

In other words: If you believe in human rights but don’t believe in God, you need a logical explanation for why they’re self-evident.