A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Many of us are committed to human rights but we can’t ground human rights? Perhaps history can help us here.
Father Francisco de Vitoria, is considered by many to be “the father of international law”. In response to Spanish colonial mistreatment of South Americans, Vitoria argued that all men were equally free and had the right to life, culture and property. Likewise Francisco Suárez, whose 1610 essay, ‘On The Laws’, argued that human beings have rights because they have been endowed with them by their Creator, using language later picked up by America’s founding fathers.[6]
These thinkers, who laid the first foundations of human rights, were not moralizing in a vacuum. Rather they rooted their idea in the uniquely biblical belief that human beings bear the image of God.
One of the most influential atheist philosophers writing today, Luc Ferry, agrees. In, A Brief History of Thought, Ferry writes that in the Greco-Roman world, it was assumed that some people were inferior to others: slaves, women, and children, for example. He writes:
Christianity.. introduce[d] the notion … that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.[7]
As one of the most influential atheists of all time, Friedrich Nietzsche remarked:
The masses blink and say ‘We are all equal—Man is but man, before God we are equal.’ Before God! But now this God has died.”[8]
So, there is a stark choice: one can adopt a Christian understanding of humanity—that we have real value and real dignity, because we are made in God’s image.[9] Or you can reject that narrative, ignore the consequences, refuse to answer Nietzsche and pretend everything is okay.
~ Dr. Andy Bannister
