Image of God does not Ground Human Rights

Atheism doesn’t but secular humanism espoused in the Enlightment does. Stephen Pinker’s just released book is a deep dive into how the Enlightment ideals of the 19th Century have become a reality in the 21st century.

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I still haven’t seen that grounding in secular humanism. Don’t forget that the Enlightenment gave grounding for some of the most systematic abuse of human rights in history.

I am really surprised that Neanderthals are deigned the “image of God” designation. They are existent. It is not like anyone has to give them any human rights or feed them or give them subsidizes. They are all gone. To say they were so close to human and then intermixed providing good genes and bad ones to almost everybody is kind of degrading. I can see how some can not want to call the Lucy Australopithecus “in the image of God” but the Neanderthals?

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Some people would say they are in the Image of God. In many Genealogical Adam models, for example, we say that God made people in his Image long before Adam. That might have included Neanderthals and Denisovans.

I’m just saying that no one can even agree on what that is. It is not like we can do an experiment to tell us the answer, or read the answer out of the Bible. We are just not going to know.

@Patrick

If we follow the YEC paradigm that de novo Adam and Eve experienced their special creation 6000 years ago, Neanderthals are completely irrelevant to the questions.

But for those who want to place de novo creation of Adam/Eve 12,000 years back, or 100,000 years back … the topic is still irrelevant.

It’s really the folks that are just aching for a good “barroom scrapping” that seem most interested in the topic…

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John Locke did not need us to be in the image of God to conclude we have rights from God. He wrote (thanks for the link @T.j_Runyon)
.
" Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker;
All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order, and
about his business; they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made
to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure. And being furnished with like
Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed
any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another,
as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are
for ours."

So Locke argued that natural rights were a consequence of mankind (even those Chapter one folks outside the garden) being given dominion over the rest of nature and humanity ruling nature on God’s authority. I.E. we were God’s agents in nature. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence he said we were “Endowed by our Creator” with certain unalienable rights. He wasn’t arguing it was because we were “in the Image”, but because of our God-given role. We are His stewards on the earth. When we mess with one another we are not merely messing with nature, but God’s fellow chosen instruments.

I have written two books on political philosophy. The second and underappreciated one mostly talks about the basis for our rights by refuting the anarchist/libertarian view of “self-ownership” as a basis for rights. That view is intellectually incoherent, as is the idea that the state owns us and defines rights. The only view of rights that makes sense is that we are the stewards of our lives and not their owners (until the next life). But the state doesn’t own us either. God owns us. And neither we nor the state have authority to mess with His property/designated agents in an unjust manner.

Scripture uses the language of rights a lot. Proverbs 14:31 says “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God”. This fits well with Locke’s position. And it is irrespective of who is or is not in “the image”. Now I will say we are all in the “likeness” of God. To be human is to be in the likeness of God. There is a difference and it takes eight or nine pages to show the difference. So I suppose you could use that language to justify rights, but I don’t think that is the main thrust of why scripture indicates people have rights. That is more connected to the fact that God is our maker and we have all been given dominion over nature, but not each other.

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14 posts were split to a new topic: @jongarvey’s Shift on Genesis 1 and 2

2 posts were split to a new topic: Use of Adam vs. Ha-Adam

Pinker’s work has been critiqued in the first of theis year’s (prestigious) Reith Lectures. Worth listening to, if you can find it out there.

In Q&As one of the commenters pointed out how violence has often been conducted in a quieter way since the Enlightenment - he cited the slow genocides of the indigenous populations of USA, Canada, Australia and parts of Africa, all accompanied by civilised treaties and legislation, and land grants - all to be reneged upon with the backing of technological violence in due time.

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Yes, Pinker’s work has been critiqued in the past. He addresses all of these critiques with a whole new set of up-to-date graphs showing how the promises of the Enlightment is happening Now. Extraodinary progress in living longer, less war, less famine, less poverty, safer food and water, safer transportation. Sure there is much more to be done, but wasting time saying “the end is near” or the world is falling apart because Christianity is in decline is patently false.

Pinkerton is an excellent cherry-picker. I’ll not clog the thread with the whole thing, but this should make most of the point…

“In the same way the illusion of prosperity is maintained by writing a trillion dollars worth of hot checks on the accounts of the next generation- something past ages of people were less willing to do to the innocent. The present Masters of the World have not invented a system so perfect that no one needs to be good anymore. All they have done is found a way to hide for a time the outward costs of human evil. But the truth will out, and time will tell what happens to souls and to societies which are built on the shifting sand of collective consensus rather than the solid rock of transcendent moral truth.”

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@anon46279830

A very good point. The decline in the economic prosperity of the USA and UK (and it would seem the entire western world, given the rise of “popularism” so-called) seems to me to be more than simply mismanagement of capital, etc.

I wonder if it may be more a feature of the slow effects of having run out of colonies and slave-labour to fund our luxury. And there still seems to be a good case for believing in the manipulation of markets by the rich - exemplified as much by the “economic colonialism” of the rising powers like China as the decline of the old ones.

To take a parallel case, the effect of IT on many African countries (and Mexico in the case of the USA?) appears to have been less to improve prosperity than to inform people that the only way to improve their lot is to risk everything to reach Europe or America, where everybody is rich, or so it seems. Meanwhile, the poverty at home is more often blamed on past colonialism than scientific ignorance.

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The Creator seems to be the grantor of all of our core rights and those are revealed to us as He sees fit. Seems this used to be called covenant and we now call it rights? But it seems we know what the rights are for living, modern humans and should be able to agree on what those are for the most part. It’s the hypothetical (AI, aliens, human hybrids) and the historical (Neanderthals, animals) where we have trouble knowing His intent.

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It seems to me the first of the two phrases here is sufficient! It represents a belief, but what other possible grounding isn’t?

Since this thread got bumped, I think I’ll share some passing thoughts.

In the Lutheran view, the Imago Dei was lost at the fall (however, humans still have special dignity as we were created in the image of God). We also say that the Image of God is being restored in Christians.

Anyway, when I consider my neighbor, it is powerful to think about how much Christ loves him. In Christ, all humans have inestimable value. If Christ loved a person enough to die and rise for that person, that person deserves respect from me.

How does that work for the people outside the Garden?

I don’t think there were any (pre-adamites, that is), and (to my knowledge, correct me if I’m wrong), that is also the traditional view. So, ultimately, I think I will leave your thought-provoking question to be answered by someone here (preferably a Lutheran) who thinks that people outside the garden were a thing. :slight_smile:

Peace.

There are a number of traditional views. That’s probably the majority view, though. Do you know how a Lutheran who believes there were people outside the Garden would handle this?