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 19:28:38 GMT
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Viewed:
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2165 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks wrote:
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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.
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You are missing something. Just because a “right” is not universal does not
mean it is therefore exclusive. I cannot deny that the US Constitution could
have come out of another religious background, but I can deny that it actually
did. You probably learned many of the same things in high school that I did,
but in attending a different school, you had a different experience, and I
cannot honestly claim to have learned in the same school that you did.
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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.
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Likewise, you probably learned a lot of different things in high school than I
did, but that does not mean we didn’t both attend high school. The J-C heritage
of colonial America (remembering that many of the colonists came here to enjoy
the freedom to follow a denomination that was persecuted in Europe) was the
specific heritage involved, not the sort that was found in Spain during the
Inquisition, in England at the founding of the Anglican Church, or in the
American southeast during the formative years of the KKK.
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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.
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There were many variables that needed to be set just right for our foundation to
turn out the way it is, for better or worse. The fact that white males were the
basis for the two Continental Congresses can be seen in the fact that neither
non-whites nor women enjoyed the same rights as white males until the 20th
Century. Therefore it’s legitimate to say that we were founded on a white male
heritage (once again pointing out, just for safety’s sake, that I do not see the
foundational heritage of the US as just cause for continuing to set laws solely
according to that heritage).
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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.
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I’m saying that we don’t have historical evidence proving the existence of any
pre-Judeic “lines”. Without knowing what might (or might not) have been used as
the foundation for Judeism, it’s a bit pretentious to be using any terms to
describe it other than “proto-Judeic”, which sounds a bit redundant (try saying
“proto-Judeo-Judeo-Christianity” out loud).
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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?
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Because there is no one single characteristic that we can point to and say with
certainty that it’s the core reason why our constitution sprung up in the US at
a time when every other nation had leaders who inherit their position. Heck, we
even could have ended up in that situation, if George Washington had been more
enticed by the idea of becoming king.
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