Today’s Secularism and the Death of Liberty

We eventually loose what we take for granted. (Which Founding Father claimed that the price of democracy is constant vigilance?). Our liberties require moral responsibility – the very thing that we increasingly find burdensome. Therefore, we reject the source of our liberties and expect to retain them.

The theologian Jurgen Habermas has pointed to the source of our liberties:

• Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source.

This is because God loves us individually and has created us to be like Him (Gen. 1:26-27). This bestows on us great intrinsic value! Even the Deist, Thomas Jefferson, was unable to conceive of these rights without God:

• And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? (Notes on the State of Virginia)

In contrast, the secularist thinks that he can take what he wants from the Bible and reject its Author. He wants to retain the notion of liberties and equal and human rights without its Source. However, history has another verdict. It shows us that pre-Christian humanity has consistently rejected equality. Even the anti-Christian philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche observed:

• Another Christian concept, no less crazy: the concept of equality of souls before God. This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights. (Will to Power)
  
  

However, the today’s secularist refuses to acknowledge such a debt. In light of this, it is interesting to note that the most renowned philosophers of the classical world also disdained the biblical assertion of human equality and liberties. Dinesh D’Souza wrote:

• Aristotle, too, had a job for low men: slavery. Aristotle argued that with low men in servitude, superior men would have leisure to think and participate in governance of the community. Aristotle cherished the ‘great-souled man’ who was proud, honorable, aristocratic, rich. (What’s so Great about Christianity)

Well, aren’t human equality and human rights self-evident? Perhaps, but secular materialism, by its very nature, must deny these. How? Materialism is the belief that only what is material – energy, matter, space (the things of science) - exists. If this is so, we are constrained to regard humanity merely materialistically. However, when we do this, we undermine any possible basis for equality, since some people are strong, others weak; some are intelligent and some are not; some are healthy, while others are not; some make positive contributions to society, while some are a burden. Therefore, the materialist is intellectually unable to treat all with the same positive regards.

Consequently, we will loose what can no longer rationally defend. Even now, our freedoms of speech, privacy and religion are being whittled away in favor of a monopolistic, demanding Secular State.