Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / The Simpsons and Human Rights || SLP546

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The Simpsons and Human Rights || SLP546 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
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• 1:39
  SPEAKER_06: Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_06: What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_06: When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_06: Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_06: And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_06: If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_06: Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is.
• 2:12
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• 2:15
  SPEAKER_06: Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_06: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_06: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_06: Have you seen the Simpsons episode where Homer climbs a mountain?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_03: You're gonna be the first man to climb the murder horn.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh no, that's it over there.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_03: Just to the right of the one you're looking at.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_06: It begins with Homer deciding to get in shape to impress Bart.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_05: Okay, here we go.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_06: So at night he sneaks off and finds his way to a strange building.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_05: What's a gime?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_06: But with the assistance of legendary actor Rainier Wolfcastle.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_05: I will shout slogans at you.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_06: And with the help of power source bars.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_05: Sorry, I only eat food in bar form.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_06: Homer gets fit.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_04: I have been working out secretly at night.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_04: And look at me now!
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_06: Then the people from PowerSource have an idea why don't they capitalize on Homer's newfound fitness and they cook up a publicity stunt to get Homer to climb the tallest mountain in Springfield, the Murderhorn, to demonstrate the wonder of power source bars.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: New angle.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_06: But when he realizes it was the efforts of others that got him there, his pride is hurt.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to climb this entire mountain on my own.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: Then technically, shouldn't you go back down and start all over?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: Shut up! You are so fired!
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_06: So without the Sherpas, Homer presses on.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: Are you crazy?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_04: You'll never make it! I'll be at the top by noon, over and out.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_06: Down below, the family is worried.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_03: Your father will be okay as long as he's with those Sherpas.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, Mom.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_06: Without the Sherpas, Homer really struggles.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_06: But in a moment of typical self-delusion, he declares himself to have made it.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_04: I made it all the way to the crap! It just keeps going!
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_06: Giving up on the summit, Homer decides to quit climbing and just drive his flag into the mountain right where he stands.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_06: Luckily enough, though, the summit crumbles, and having considerably reduced the mountain's height, Homer has technically climbed the motorhorn.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: You made it to the top.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: You're the coolest dad ever.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_05: Thanks, Bert.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_05: That makes it all worthwhile.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: Is that your woman?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_06: Don't Why am I discussing The Simpsons?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_06: Well, because many people want to tell you that humanity has progressed up Wright's Mountain and that we are roughly at the summit.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_06: No thanks to Christians and that Dark Ages nonsense that went on before.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_06: Apparently, Enlightenment philosophy has gotten us where we are, and so modern Western liberals say, Wow, look how far I climbed, and I'm not even tired.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_06: All the while, those Sherpers, called Christians, have in fact been doing the heavy lifting, bringing us decisively away from some very morally troubling classical views.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_06: It's Christians who have been thinking through what it means for humanity to be in the image of God, that we are individuals, that we are all equal, no matter our race or gender or ethnicity, that we have human rights, that governments should be limited by parliaments and social contracts, and all throughout this period from antiquity, the church has been, without question, the greatest force for human progress in history.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_06: If you don't believe me, tell me, what would you call a movement that founded charity?
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_06: Not just charities, I mean, it's founded countless thousands upon countless thousands of charities.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_06: I'm talking about a movement that founded the concept of charity as we now understand it.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_06: Or consider a movement that founded hospitals, or hospices, or orphan care, or a movement that abolished infanticide, or an organization that abolished blood sports, or abolished child sexual abuse, aka pederasty, or that instituted lifelong matrimony, or a movement that established political and cultural norms like the secular or just wars or parliaments or universities or the modern scientific method or the abolition of the slave trade.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_06: Imagine if you came across an organization that accomplished just one of these phenomenal developments.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_06: We would shower that organization with unending praise.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_06: Except that we don't, because there is one organization that has brought all these advances, the Church of Jesus Christ.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_06: The Church is like the Sherpers.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_06: And how do modern Westerners respond?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_06: Like Homer.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_06: We awake, having been dragged up the mountain, and we say, Look how far we've come, and we're not even tired.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_06: Well, no, we're not tired because it was the efforts of others that got us here.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity has given us our modern humanistic sensibilities.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_06: Don't believe me?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_06: Let me quote three different thinkers.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_06: First of all, perhaps the world's foremost living philosopher Jürgen Habermas, he has said this.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity, if nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_06: To this day we've no other option than Christianity.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_06: We continue to nourish ourselves from this source.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_06: Everything else is postmodern chatter.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_06: Or take Britain's foremost philosopher John Grey, an avowed atheist who nevertheless considers liberalism to be a footnote to Christianity, particularly Protestantism.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_06: He writes, All four of the defining ideas of liberal thought are continuations of Christian monotheism.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_06: He lists the four as the primacy of the individual, equality, liberal universalism, and the belief in progress.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_06: They are all taken from Christianity.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_06: A third thinker, historian Tom Holland, writes, We remain the children of the Christian revolution, the most disruptive, the most influential, and the most enduring revolution in history.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_06: Our fundamental beliefs in human rights and dignity and equality and progress, they are fundamentally Christian beliefs.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_06: This is not what you hear from many atheists today.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_06: Many have the Homer Simpson view of history.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_06: Apparently, we stand far above the abysmal views of our ancestors, not because we were carried by Christianity, but because we have recently awoken.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_06: We conclude that we are excellent climbers because now we happen to stand on certain ethical heights.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_06: Yet instead of connecting those moral beliefs to their foundations in Christianity, we consider our modern position to be natural, obvious, it's just the air we breathe.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_06: There's a book in there somewhere, I reckon.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_06: But modern humanist beliefs only seem obvious because we have been carried for so long by Christian assumptions.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_06: And in that sense, Christianity has been too successful.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_06: That's something Tom Holland commonly says.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_06: Here he is making his case for the distinctively Christian origins of our beliefs, and he begins by talking about compassion and equality.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_06: Two values that were shockingly rejected by the Nazis.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the not I mean the Nazis repudiated two of the fundamental values that Christianity has always enshrined, and one of them you you you just touched on, the the idea that um the survivor you know the survival of the fittest, that the the idea that that to be strong is to be good.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was kind of fairly fundamental idea, say for the Greeks.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they kind of conflated uh you know the good beauty and a goodness and strength.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this it was to be to be a good person.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um but of course the other uh fundamental Christian ideal that the Nazis repudiate is the idea that, as Paul put it, there is no Jew or Greek.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that in turn is a kind of refinement of the the teaching of Genesis that God creates man and woman in his image.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, if men and women are created in the image of God, every human being has an inherent dignity.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this is an idea that over the course of the Middle Ages kind of feeds into the idea that human beings have rights, that if you know, and and this is something that um that that churchmen and uh lawyers in in the 12th century start to extrapolate from the gospel teachings, if Christ is saying to the wealthy, you have a duty to to feed the hungry and to clothe those who have no clothes and to give shelter to those who are homeless, then it follows that the hungry have a right to food, and those without clothes have a right to clothes, and those who don't have a home have a right to a home.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so you start to get the idea that human beings have inherent rights, and these are ideas that secularized feed into the American Revolution, into the French Revolution, into um uh United Nations.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's it's a very, very um uh profound idea that today, for lots of people who believe in human rights, they they tend to kind of assume that they are imminent.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: But in the long run, you know, when you look at it in the kind of historical perspective, to believe in human rights requires just as much a leap of faith as believing that the Lord Jesus Christ rose on the third day and ascended into heaven.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's i these are these are theological precepts, three theological ideas that um have been bred specifically of Christian history.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the genius of the West has been to kind of package them and market them as though somehow they've been you know, removed from the Christian context that gave them birth.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_06: Beliefs in human rights, equality, and dignity have been repackaged as natural and obvious values when they are in fact faith positions.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity has been so successful that it has now become the air we breathe.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_06: It has now become the natural, obvious, self-evident position to hold.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_06: But these beliefs in human rights and equality and dignity are particularly Christian faith positions.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_06: But the repackaging has kind of worked.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity has been so successful that we assume its moral outlook as though it's imminent, as though it's just obvious and can simply be read off of nature.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_06: This is something that Michael Shermer seems to believe.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_06: I debated Michael Shermer two weeks ago on Premier Unbelievable, and this is my second video reflecting on our dialogue.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_06: You can check out response one from last week in the description.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_06: Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, is a moral realist.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_06: He believes in the reality of moral truths like human rights.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_06: But to use Tom Holland's term, he thinks they are imminent.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: Our human nature leads us to want to be free, autonomous individuals with control over our bodies and choices.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: And you only have to look around the world to see what people actually want.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and so on.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so therefore, I you know, I think we do have a moral obligation to help people in other countries that uh are being oppressed, you know, to the extent that we can.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: We can't do everything.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: But um, and I think that comes from discovering what these actual rights are.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: They really are there in the same way that maths are there, or platonic concepts of like logic or you know, beauty, truth, the circle, the triangle, whatever.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, these things are really there.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_06: Rights are really there, he says.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_06: That's a strong statement.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_06: But in print, he is even stronger.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_06: Here's what Dr.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_06: Shermer said in his 2020 book, Giving the Devil His Due Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_06: It is my hypothesis that in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that are really out there, so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_06: Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits, given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_06: Scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_06: Michael Schirmer thinks human rights are part of the metaphysical furniture of the universe.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_06: There, waiting to be discovered.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_06: They are imminent in the world, as Tom Holland might put it.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_06: They are self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence puts it.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_06: Have you ever thought about how your bank uses your savings?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_06: What if I told you there's a fully regulated Christian bank that aligns your money with your faith?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_06: When you open a Kingdom Bank savings account, you help to provide vital mortgages for churches, Christian ministries, and gospel workers who might struggle to secure one elsewhere.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_06: Whether saving for yourself or on behalf of your church, your savings will support Christian ministries across the UK.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_06: And when you're ready to take your money out, you get it back with interest.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_06: If your spending and giving reflect your faith, shouldn't your savings as well?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_06: Open a savings account with Kingdom Bank today and put your money where your heart is.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_06: Visit kingdom.bankslash speaklife.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_06: Kingdom Bank is a member of the FSCS and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_06: Michael Shermer really believes that we stand on Rights Mountain and that there's something solid beneath our feet.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_06: But he denies that we've been dragged up Rights Mountain by Christian convictions.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_06: So this is what I say to Dr.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_06: Shermer.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_06: I'm very glad that Dr.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_06: Shermer does go with a Doctorate of Human Rights.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_06: I think he that his history is out by at least six centuries.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_06: I think the Gregorian reforms of the of the 11th century were where that first articulation of um human rights really come from, and and absolutely it was a reflection upon the image of God on page one of the Bible.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_06: There have always been theological underpinnings to what human rights have been.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_06: So in the 11th century, that was the first real articulation of that particular language.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_06: I think they've always existed in the same way that gravity existed before Isaac Newton um wrote the Principia Mathematica.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_06: He discovered something that was already there.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_06: I think the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century were um articulating something that was already there.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_06: I think in the 18th century, what you have is Thomas Jefferson saying, We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_06: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_06: Now, um, as Dr.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_06: Schermer is aware, and he writes about it very compellingly in his book The Moral Ark, it was Thomas Jefferson who said that we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men have been created by their uh endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_06: And it was Benjamin Franklin that put uh put his quill through that and said, no, not sacred and undeniable self-evident.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_06: And what Franklin is trying to do is found the Republic on self-evident reason rather than on revelation, rather than on the sacred truth that humans are endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_06: Now, that that still works only within a theological universe, because let's think about what human rights are.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_06: Um human rights are these non-arbitrary things.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_06: We've been endowed these rights by our creator according to the Declaration of Independence.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_06: It's not just that human beings have asserted that we are valuable because that's just a power play.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_06: Um we're we're in this cosy little club and we've decided that we've we've got human rights.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_06: Well, who's we and and why should what we say have any uh moral valency to it?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_06: Um and and so the Declaration of Independence is absolutely saying, no, it's non-arbitrary.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_06: Someone from outside the system, a moral legislator who has the authority to say that humans have value, has said so.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_06: And it is uh an unconditional human right that we have, no matter how rich or poor we are, slave or free, black or white, no matter your identity, no matter your strengths, no matter your resources, like everybody uh possesses this human right.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_06: It's universal, it goes to the very fringes of the human family, and it's equal.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_06: No one within this human family uh has any more of a right than anybody else.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_06: Now, again, this is a thoroughly theological anthropology.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_06: It's a thoroughly theological view of what the human person actually is, and when you're born into the world, it is not obvious, it is not self-evident um that all people are possessors of this metaphysical kind of pixie dust called human rights.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_06: It it is not self-evident.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_06: The only thing self-evident about human rights is that they're not self-evident, which is why they have not been the product of other civilizations around the world down through history.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_06: They have come to us through a particularly Christian history because they are a particularly Christian kind of metaphysic.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_06: So this is my position.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_06: Thomas Jefferson was somewhat aware that he'd been carried up Rights Mountain by Christians.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_06: His favorite philosopher was John Locke, who was, yes, a massive Enlightenment thinker, but also a Christian believer, and he was clear that his beliefs in rights derived from Christian assumptions.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_06: And he very much drew upon Richard Hooker, the great Christian theologian who got it from the Christian Emperor Justinian and his legal code, which was itself based on the Bible.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_06: These are sacred truths, says Jefferson.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_06: Always have been.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_06: Benjamin Franklin, though, thought it's too contested an idea to found the Republic on sacred truths.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_06: We need to found it on self-evident truths.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_06: We need to found it on reason, not on revelation.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_06: But the only thing that is self-evident about rights is that they are not self-evident.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_06: Other cultures have not thought this way about the human person, about the individual, about equality, about human dignity and rights.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_06: Only a very Christianized culture considered these things self-evident.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_06: And in 1776, the vast majority of America's founding fathers were Christians.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_06: They were Orthodox Protestant Christians mostly.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_06: The only reason they could even think to call human rights self-evident is because they were so steeped in the Bible.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity had already pulled them up to that height.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_06: Well, at that point, Dr.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_06: Shermer rightly wants to know, really, is it really from the Bible?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_06: So first I give a sixty-second Bible overview that foregrounds the place of humanity in Scripture.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_06: I think page one of the Bible um gives you a theological anthropology.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_06: What are human beings like?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_06: And we are not just survival machines, we are not just here to replicate our DNA.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_06: Um, we are those who are king and queen of all creation, male and female, made in God's image with dominion over the world and tasked with that job of bringing dominion over the world.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_06: And so the divine right of kings, as it were, um was first really applied to humanity in general in Genesis chapter one.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_06: And certainly uh there is a fall from that kind of situation, and we've got the Old Testament as this non ideal provisional kind of uh ethical system, but Christ comes as the image of God to raise us up into a community in which there is no Lord except Him, where all brothers and sisters in The same family, and there is no male nor female nor uh slave or free, Jew, or Gentile, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_06: I think that's as quick as I can do in terms of a biblical theology of that trajectory that gives you the language of rights.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_06: That's the biblical overview.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_06: Later on, I talk about the theological development in Christianity.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_06: And I think uh humanity's intellectual firepower has been most concentrated on the question of humanity uh when it comes to the humanity of Christ.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_06: And I think the this centuries-long intellectual tradition of trying to figure out what is a person, it was theologi were theologians who are constantly thinking about what is a person because they were hammering out the doctrine of the Trinity, and then they have to hammer out this doctrine of, well, this second person of the Trinity, God the Son, um, takes on a full humanity, and he takes on this humanity as man, and he's he's the man Jesus of Nazareth, and yet he saves humanity by being man.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_06: So apparently, men and women like share a human nature, and for all the differences between male and female, those are both biological and scriptural, but for all the differences between male and female, apparently we share one nature because Christ, in assuming uh a male humanity, is a man for all men in that universal sense, and he's also Jew, uh a Jew, but apparently he's a Jew for all peoples and all nations.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_06: And so you see, even in his own person, that Galatians 3, verse 28 kind of verse, is um is is is actually um he is the one who ensures that male and female share a single nature and that um and that Jew and Gentile, you know.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_06: So ethnicity and gender um uh are kind of uh are transcended by a single human nature, and what you have in God the Son is as he adopts humanity, he is the one who so bestows value on the human person.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_06: You couldn't be um uh a more serious humanist than a Christian because a Christian believes in God the human, right?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_06: We have we have the highest place for humanity.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_06: The highest place for humanity is seated at the right hand of God, um so that humanity has been exalted to the very highest place by someone who has the authority to do so.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_06: It's not just that Thomas Jefferson and his other land-owning European and American uh males have decided that we're going to confer rights on ourselves, and it's not governments that confer rights on ourselves.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_06: There is a legitimate um moral authority that can say humanity has dignity and worth.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_06: And Christ has assumed that humanity and raised it to the highest height, so that you now you could not have a higher view of the dignity, dignity, and the worth of humanity.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_06: You also have a humanity in Christ that is above the selfishness of um us squabbling kind of um animals.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_06: T.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_06: S.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_06: Eliot said that you if you take from the word humanity everything that the Bible has given to it, what you are left with is a very clever, adaptable, mischievous animal.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_06: Um and when we say, oh, that's inhumane, or um when we talk about being a humanist, we apparently don't mean um those terrible crimes that humans can often commit.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_06: We apparently mean that there is a virtuous human who somehow exists above all selfishness that is being called valuable by a moral authority that is able to call it um valuable, that this humanity transcends differences of race and ethnicity and and and gender.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_06: Um and all these things are are kind of part and parcel of the Christian theology.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_06: I think you try and derive your humanism from somewhere else, and I think Yuval Noah Harari is absolutely right, you know, that if you take a human being, cut them open, you will not find human rights.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_06: You will find the heart and neurons and kidneys, but you won't find any rights.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_06: The place you find rights, says Yuval Noah Harari, is in the stories that we've told about human beings that are found in the Bible.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_06: He's very clear that our concept of human rights, so you know, he it's it's not just Jurgen Habermas and John Gray and Larry Sidentop and Tom Holland and Nietzsche that are telling you that humanism comes from Christianity.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_06: Um you've got you've got modern skeptics like Yval No Harari saying that humanism has come from Christianity, and I think it's come from Christianity for those kinds of theological reasons.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_06: So here I don't give the neatest presentation of these truths, but there are four things that I'm trying to identify about rights, four things that are given to it by Christian theology.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_06: But I don't think you get these four foundations elsewhere.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity helps you to answer what's so good about humans, what's so special about humans, why all humans, and why all humans equally?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_06: First, what's so good about humans?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_06: We like the idea of humanism and of being humane and humanitarian.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_06: But we're all aware that there's plenty of very negative traits in human beings.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_06: Where does this pure humanity exist that is able to judge between the better angels of our nature and our inner demons?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_06: Why does compassion get to be called humane when humans are just as capable of cruelty?
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_06: Where is this good humanity that defines us as compassionate?
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_06: Well, Christian's answer he is at the right hand of the Father, and he's very good.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_06: What is the non Christian answer?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_06: Second question, what's so special about humans?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_06: The Declaration of Independence says we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, and it's not an unfair question to ask who's we?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_06: And when you say all men, is that just a quirk of eighteenth century English or is there something narrow about the Declaration because it was a declaration written by men, by slave owning men, no less.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_06: So what does it mean to say all men are created equal?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_06: When Jefferson held six hundred such men as property, it might sound like there's a club being set up by a bunch of insiders, and the founders of the club are granting immense privileges to those who are in the club.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_06: Problem number one, that doesn't sound very inclusive.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_06: Are women really full members?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_06: What about the enslaved?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_06: So it's not necessarily inclusive, but problem number two, it sounds really arbitrary.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_06: We've decided to grant ourselves rights.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_06: Is that just an arbitrary assertion?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_06: Is it just a power play?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_06: How is it morally justified for a bunch of people to confer privileges on themselves?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_06: What's so special about humans?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_06: Again, Christians have a good answer.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_06: God is the supreme moral arbiter, and he has elected to favor humanity forever.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_06: God the Son has assumed our humanity.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_06: What's so special about humanity?
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_06: Well, God the human.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_06: Non-Christian answers to that question risk being arbitrary.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_06: It risks being an amoral power play where humans just assert their own value.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_06: Is there anything moral about that?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_06: Third question.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_06: Why is it all humans who have rights?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_06: Think back to 1776.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_06: You might think in terms of the divine rights of King George.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_06: He is the supremely valuable person, right?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_06: In his system.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_06: The American revolutionaries say, no, we the people have a divine right.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_06: Well, great.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, well but who's we?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_06: All of us?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_06: Women too?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_06: Slaves too?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_06: And the biblical logic is that yes, all humans are in God's image, and because God the Son has assumed humanity by taking flesh as a Jewish man, apparently men and women must share in a human nature.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_06: Jesus assumes all human nature when he came as a man.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_06: Humanity transcends gender, and it also transcends ethnicity.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_06: Since the Jewish Messiah redeems all tribes, nations, peoples, and tongues, then there must be a single thing, a single thing called humanity that transcends all those ethnic differences.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_06: So Christians can say all humans, no matter your gender, your ethnicity, your station in life, all humans are in on this thing called the image of God.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_06: I'm not sure that non-Christian grounds for the universality of human rights can be as strong.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_06: And finally, fourth question, why all humans equally?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_06: Someone once complained to Joseph Goebbels that the Jews were also humans.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_06: And Goebbels agreed, yes, the Jew is a man, but what sort of man?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_06: asked Goebbels.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_06: The flea is also an animal, but the question is whether he's an agreeable animal.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_06: Even Nazis can agree that we share a common humanity, but what follows from that in terms of moral values or duties?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_06: Why are all humans equally valuable?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_06: We share a powerful moral intuition that people are equally valuable, but where does it come from?
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_06: It has come historically from some deep Christian convictions.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_06: Can we ground that conviction in other foundations?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_06: Well, people have tried.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_06: But what they have tried at that point is a little bit like Homer Simpson setting off from the position the Sherpers led him to.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_06: Homer uses that foundational help to climb further, and I'm not saying that the Enlightenment has not given to the world certain advances.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_06: It has.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_06: But they have built upon foundational Christian ideas and often made good progress.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_06: But they've also done what Homer did in the episode.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_06: Demolish some once lofty heights and bring them down to their level.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_06: On the goodness of humanity, we no longer have a definitive humanity in Jesus Christ.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_06: And so the very concept of humanity becomes problematic.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_06: On the exceptionalism of humanity, we no longer have good reasons to resist transhumanism or the prizing of clever animals over not so clever humans.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_06: On the universality of humanity, we routinely overlook, dehumanize, and even eliminate the unborn, the elderly, the disabled.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_06: On the equality of each and every human, well, if science is our foundation, science can only measure the differences between humans.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_06: So if we ground our humanism there, the pressure will be huge to prove differences, and we might just lose equality.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_06: Like Homer Simpson, the Enlightenment Humanist Project forgets where it comes from, and in pressing on without Christian convictions, it makes some progress, but also demolishes the heights we once aimed for.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_06: But here's my final thought.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_06: We can argue about the historical sources of humanism, and maybe you think there are many paths up this mountain.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_06: I don't think you're right, but even if you are, even if scientific humanism could get you there, as could Buddhism, as could Stoicism, even if all those paths lead to the summit, you have not made an argument against Christianity.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_06: Because the mountain is an irreducibly Christian mountain.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_06: What we're talking about when we're talking about human rights is that there is an exalted and righteous humanity that is the standard for all humanity, but also the hope for all humanity.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_06: This supreme and pure humanity judges us, but also includes us, and includes all of us equally, right to the very fringes of the human family.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_06: As soon as you've said that, you've just described Jesus Christ.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_06: Human rights at their best are a secularized Christology.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_06: No wonder the author of the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights said he'd just put forward the Christian morality freed from the tomirot.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_06: That's what he thought Christian metaphysics are, tomirot.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_06: But he wanted to extract Christian metaphysics from Christian morality.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_06: He wanted to secularize Christology.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_06: And that's why we're left with a supreme and righteous humanity that exists above our very feeble and compromised humanity, a humanity that judges us but also includes us.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_06: Wright's Mountain is Christian through and through.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_06: You might fire the Sherpas that dragged you up there, you might throw away all your Christian maps and equipment, you might press on to the summit in your own name and for your own glory, but you are on Christian ground the whole time.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_06: If you think that the moral universe is such that there is a supreme and righteous humanity that stands above you as judge, but also includes you mystically somehow, you are very clearly assuming a Christian-ish metaphysic.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_06: And you can rail against institutional Christianity all you like.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_06: I often do that too.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_06: But at that stage, we are like Homer Simpson, firing the Sherpas and crediting ourselves with our progress.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_06: Rail against Christianity all you like, but you're standing on Christian ground.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_06: And it might be worth acknowledging the true foundations for your position.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_06: One way you can do that is by doing our course 321.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_06: It's an online introduction to Christian faith that you can do in eight sessions.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_06: You can binge it in a couple of hours or take your time.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_06: Do it solo, do it with a friend, or find one of 350 churches that are running it.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_06: Go to 321course.com, start an account with your email and a password, and you're in.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_06: It's completely free, and you can discover life according to Jesus.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_06: That's all we've got time for.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_06: Please like the video if you've gotten this far, share it with a friend, and if you haven't already, do subscribe so we can join you on the next one.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_06: Thanks so much.