7.genie #fundie disqus.com

Our notions of dignity are ultimately based on God’s dignity and our being made in God’s image. Thus, we apply titles of dignity to people, but not to animals or other elements of creation. John Smith appears to sound more important when he is called “Dr. Smith,” “the honorable Congressman Smith,” or “President Smith.” But “Germ Smith” just doesn’t have the same ring. People do not build monuments to germs. Few people grieve when a fly dies.

This is not just a semantic or historical matter. The value difference between humanist and creation visions of human worth has profound significance. Martin Luther King Jr. did not give his life to advance the cause of equal civil rights for black germs. Many thousands now work tirelessly in the right to life movement, but not to save the lives of preborn viruses. Although at the gut level we automatically assume the dignity of human beings, it is pure nonsense apart from creation.

I know that secular humanism waxes eloquently about how important it is for us to be virtuous, and how important it is for us to work for human dignity and for freedom and industry and love. But intellectually, I’ve never seen anything more pitiful than the type of philosophical humanism that tells us on the one hand that our origin as human beings is a cosmic accident, that we are grownup germs who have emerged fortuitously from the slime, and that we are destined ultimately to annihilation to non-being, to the abyss of das Nichts, the nothingness, but that even so, we enjoy enormous significance in between our origin and our destiny. Talk about fantasy and wish projection. Talk about blind faith and leaping into absurdity. What could be more absurd than to celebrate the significance of grownup germs? I say candidly to the secular humanist: “Don’t come to me and tell me about human dignity, because I don’t care whether white germs or black germs sit in the back of the bus. And I don’t care about whose slime is blown away by a nuclear holocaust. If I’m going to care about human beings and about human dignity, I want a reason.”

If you call me to sacrificial, altruistic action in behalf of human beings, you better have a reason. And it should be greater than simply, we should be for people because we’re people. Because unless we can establish that it means something to be people, it’s pure emotion. And rights granted on the basis of pure emotion ultimately unravel. What emotion gives, it can also take away. But if our human dignity is given by God and that is recognized by our culture, then we have fundamental human rights that inform how we treat other people under the law and even one-on-one at the personal level.

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