A better summary of the argument than mine can be found here:
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You could even say he was a bit of a two-faced son of a bitch about it all, really. Patronizing racism and rabid antisemitism aside, he himself certainly made a lot of cash trading in slaves regardless of any purported principles he might have held - but then, he always did have a thing about money. Count it first, repent later, if you will.
He also considered it a genuine good deed to be taking negroes away from Africa, to work in and for civilized society. So, really, Voltaire wasn’t against slavery at all, although he might have been against the mistreatment of slaves.
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Yeah, point taken, I probably shouldn’t have brought up Voltaire. That offhand line in the Candide also can’t really be construed as a ‘serious’ engagement with the issue.
I am not sure how I did it, but I had never encountered the tracts against slavery from Diderot or Montesquieu or Rousseau. (I am not sure that I would include Voltaire, based on some of his other comments, but I won’t quibble on that point having missed the others.)
In the spirit of fairness : Rousseau was kinda sorta maybe a bit Christian if you squint right.
Raised a Swiss Protestant, he then converted to Catholicism (to revert back out of convenience much later in life) - although he didn’t believe in miracles, the import of faith or the concept of original sin ; disliked organized religion and churches ; was very suspicious of priests and their influence over secular societies ; and would get married in the eyes of civil law but wouldn’t do it again in a church, a scandalous thing back then. For the most part, he was merely a vague deist of the “the world is orderly therefor there must be a god” variety… but he still self-described as a Roman Catholic.
And I’m told by some Christians that it’s all it takes, so there you go :).
Reminds me of the reasons why the U.S. still hasn’t ratified the International Criminal Court treaty. All the other democracies did, but we’re exceptional!
No, that’s the DOI. Important difference. The DOI is a revolutionary document, all revolutions are illegal by definition, so Jefferson had to make an appeal to natural law. The Constitution is a legal document intended to establish a permanent state and, as such, implies no right of rebellion anywhere (no, especially not in the Second Amendment).
Well, church-state separation fits better with Christianity than with Islam, anyway, because Christianity started out as an illegal underground religion that had to morally justify some disobedience to the state, while the Islamic movement was in control of its state from day one (i.e., the *Hijira).*
What gets overlooked is that to a large extent rights are determined by listening to people who claim theirs have been violated. People complain that, “hey, I shouldn’t be punished for doing something perfectly harmless like criticizing the government using mere words, or gathering together a group of like-minded individuals, or performing my religious rituals behind closed doors”, and if they can get politicians to empathize with them well enough, laws can be passed establishing those forms of behavior as protected ones.
A quick look at the Constitution shows how our suite of rights is strongly influenced by the grievances of a lot of the people at that time. The 3rd Amendment prohibits forcing people to quarter troops in their homes. That’s not the very third thing a deity is liable to think of and hand down, but in the Colonies, a lot of people were thinking, “It isn’t right that we should have to put up with this”, and so it’s way up there on the list.
And once the idea is hit upon that there should be laws that prohibit rulers from interfering with certain activities of the common people, thinkers at different times have tried to rationalize a comprehensive list of rights, as well as to justify them to the prevailing culture, and the debate as to just what and why continues to this day.
According to the writers of the Constitution, people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. This includes rebelling against a king.
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But the Judeo-Christian name for the Supreme Being is “The Lord God Almighty”. “The Creator” is the generic term. The point of the phrase in the DOI is that it’s a self-evident truth that we are endowed with inalienable rights. Nothing about God is self-evident; religion is a matter of faith.
Is it not true that at the time of the American Revolution the majority of Christians believed in the Divine Right of Kings?
Not all that generic; assuming that there was a single creator god who then remains in charge afterwards is a Judeo-Christian concept. Why else assume that there was one creator and not many? Why else assume that the creator is also the one who endowed those rights, instead of being overthrown and replaced by the endower?
That all fits into Judeo-Christian mythology; not, say, Greek.
But it also fits a thoroughly simplified understanding of existence. There’s one god in the same sense that there’s one internet. It’s an amorphous and unfathomable entity and not the cast of a soda opera. Portraying the forces responsible for us being here as singular does not automatically mandate a strictly biblical or Judeo-christian set of laws.
No; it’s more like claiming there’s only one internet, with only one guy on it, and he’s the only person who made and built it. And doing so when there happens to already be a specific religion that claims that.
Sure it does; “Creator” is a Christian term made just vague enough that people can pretend that they aren’t really pushing Christianity.
Is it? I’m not aware that it was, though I’m also not aware of any opinion polls on the subject. The English had already had a revolution where they chopped off the king’s head and the French would follow suit a few years later. Of course there were many other countries that, tragically, didn’t manage to decapitate their monarchs during the 18th century.
Sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t also believe said kings had been ordained by god hisself. I mean, we *did *kill him too. Once. For about three days. Hey, it was the naughties, everybody was experimenting back then.