Subject:
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Re: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 26 Jul 2004 13:31:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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2207 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Laswell wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
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Perhaps, but neither can you claim with authority that Judeism is
foundational. The best you can say is “I think it is the foundation” or “I
have chosen to accept that it is the foundation.”
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I can to the extent that we can trace the religious and moral heritage seen
in the US constitution back to Judeism through Christianity. Besides even if
you could prove the existence of a religious pangaea, it’s pretty pointless
to assign credit to a specific state’s foundation on the basis that it fails
to distinguish it from any other state. It’s like saying the US government
was founded on human ideals. What government wasn’t?
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I think our wires have gotten crossed in this part of the topic. Recently I
have argued that there are no truly inherent rights, and that all rights are
social constructs. Since in this passage we both appear to be arguing
toward that same end, I’m not sure what we’re really arguing about.
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As I read it, you were arguing that our “inalienable” rights were universally
held (thereby showing that they couldn’t be credited to a specific religious
heritage), and I was showing that they were not (thereby showing that they
could).
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Unless I’m missing something you’re assigning a causative relationship between
religious background and the commonality of “rights” and other(?) socio-legal
constructs. In effect, you’re saying that these notions of rights are
demonstrably not universal, therefore they must be Judeo-Christian. But surely,
since I can point to some of our “inalienable” rights and demonstrate that other
nations, equally- or more-clearly tied to a J-C heritage deny those rights, that
(at least) those rights (and by extrapolation, probably, other socio-legal
constructs) do not actually derive from the J-C heritage. And, as Dave pointed
to, most of those rights can be drawn out of the writings of the Enlightenment.
Obviously “Enlightenment” and “J-C heritage” are confounding variables since one
group basically resides within the other, but you can look to the differences
between states that rose out of the Enlightenment and states that did not, but
that all share similar historic reliance on J-C heritage to note some things.
Of course there are lots of other confounding variables too. I think it’s a
much murkier picture than to claim complete reliance on religious heritage.
Further, you’re saying that one arbitrarily drawn line (just “behind” Judaism)
is the right line while a line, one or more steps “back” would be pointless. I
think that “to assign credit to a specific state’s foundation on the basis that
it fails to distinguish it from any other state” is good and valid. But why
doesn’t it apply to one state’s derivation from or reliance on the J-C heritage
just as well?
Chris
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