YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
I have hundreds of trees on my property. If I cut one down, 20 more will begin growing elsewhere on the acreage the following spring.
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Do All People Have at least some Measure of Worth or Value?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
Infinitum
Possessed Bookworm
To put it simply: yes, no, and maybe. I don't know and neither do you, and here's why:
Let's assume it's possible to assign a person a singular worth or value. Now the question becomes: what does this mean in concrete terms of the word? Does this mean that their life really is moot if their value goes below a given point, either by action or circumstance? On the surface the answer seems terribly simple: let's get rid of murderers and molesters, people who are more monster than human.
But then we're left with the question whether two seemingly similar actions are truly comparable. Is a murderer still a murderer if the act was made in self-defence? Is the murder equally heinous if done when fully sober, compared to being mentally ill or drunk? By assuming a person's worth is tied to their actions, we open ourselves up to the dilemma of assigning a value to everything, including their upbringing, their societal status, even the culture they hail from. That dilemma is one of the main reasons why court cases get so complicated and why we need professional judges -- it's an attempt to provide satisfactory answers for us to matters of value, as the victim's worth is pitted against the criminal's. The jury is however still out on whether even our legal systems assign value correctly: take the dispute over capital punishment, for example.
And this gets us to the next question, which is where value initially even stems from. Is it personal? Is it societal? Is it scientific? Any single individual is likely to fail at one of these checks, and those three are just the ones I could come up with off the top of my head. For example, a person can have great personal value to a while still being seen as "problem waste" on societal standards -- a severely sick child for example, who isn't expected to live to adulthood and will thus never contribute to the "greater good". Simultaneously this same child can have immense scientific value as a means of curing the illness in question, but often only using methods that are socially seen as ethically questionable.
And conversely a person with no close friends, no interpersonal value, can still be indispensable as part of larger society as a political leader, a researcher, or a doctor, despite lacking the usual virtues of being a likeable person in the eyes of anyone.
Let's then assume a person needs some or most of these to climb above what we'll call the Minimum Value Line. Who draws the line? Who weighs the different values against each other and decides "this is how much you're worth"? Is there really anyone who has the needed understanding, let alone authority, to make decisions like these? The initial answer may be that we decide that collectively, but even our collective instinct can be wrong.
Many in the thread have mentioned nearly universally deplored people like Hitler. Would the world have been a better place if Hitler was killed in the crib? Maybe. Maybe. There's another aspect of this that makes it a whole lot more complicated. The problem with any given person is that what they become isn't determined in a vacuum; in a sense one could say that it doesn't matter how many times you go back and kill Hitler, because there will always be another Hitler just around the corner. Evil needs structure to spread, it latches on to society as a whole and bubbles up to the surface in times of chaos and fear.
We like to exempt ourselves from that process, but there's no way of saying which of our actions have indirectly led to the evil in another -- everything is interconnected and there's no escaping that butterfly effect. Just like we stamp away at poison mushrooms in our yard without realising we're feeding those same mushrooms by watering our roses in the garden, our choices and actions will affect what happens around us, however insignificantly, and when a large group of people make insignificant choices, the resulting web itself becomes significant. Then, does it truly mean that only evil-doers are to blame for being what they've become, or is it us who are to blame for failing to prevent the evils from even taking root?
We're tribal creatures at the core. We love black and white, we latch on to "us" and "them". The familiar is good, the foreign scares us. Our instinctive sense of value or the lack of it is directly linked to whether we consider someone a threat to ourselves or not, or, on the other side of things, whether they help our survival or not. From a very limited perspective, I could have a decent claim in saying only my immediate family has value to me, because to me it would personally mean nothing if my neighbour was killed overnight. Nothing in my life would change -- apart from me possibly having to paint that border fence myself. This is the sort of thinking many extremist groups fall into, and what makes the likes of Hitler so disgusting to us. If we have a level of basic empathy, we realise soon enough, "It could be me. I could be that very neighbour."
So what's the solution to this? That the question itself has no meaning? Maybe, but I prefer to question the way we assign value to people in the first place. I say the value has to be unknowable and treated as such. Only by refusing to assign a value to others can be retain the value of ourselves, because then we avoid the pitfalls of lessening our own. Our courts treat our accused as innocent until otherwise proven, we go out every day and are polite to strangers despite knowing someone of them won't do the same for us -- we treat others like we want to be treated, and by doing so we're really upholding an ancient pact on what it even means to be human.
PS. The cultural differences in assigning people values is easily seen in how countries treat their prisoners. More egalitarian societies seem to prefer softer (or at least less violent) sentences, the most notable example in recent years being Norway’s refusal to introduce the death sentence after the shock of the 2011 terrorist attacks. Some Islamic countries on the other hand have taken the completely opposite route, which seems to mirror their lack of assigning an absolute worth to a person. (I couldn't come up with easy counter-examples for this, but I'm all ears if someone comes up with a great rebuttal.)
Infinitum
Possessed Bookworm
I my view, no it doesn't. We execute someone more for symbolic reasons than for anything else, because when the person is dead, they're gone and in a sense get away easier than having to live with the knowledge that the whole world hates them. Being locked away can be a worse fate than death in several ways -- depending on other factors, of course.
Here's a trick question: let's assume we got Hitler on trial. Would the judge still look him into the eyes and speak to him directly? My assumption is yes, and that alone shows that we might in fact be incapable of completely dehumanizing someone unless we really tried. And that goes back to what "value" even means and whether it's a helpful measure to use.
Shad
Veteran Member
Yes otherwise people will start to determine who is valued and who is not. As you can see many people have used the typical figures to argue about individual's value using primarily hindsight and contributions made by the individual. However one can make the same type of assessment for say citizens of African nations facing many natural and economic crisis. Those individuals take more than they produce be it foodstuffs, infrastructure, financing, etc. Those individuals do not produce anything of worth to the outsider or for the global. One can easily slip into apathy or go further into ordering undesirables and the valueless to be "dealt with". It leads to dehumanization of millions anyways regardless of any "solution"
Basic human rights require all humans to have value. Otherwise rights are made on a case by case basis all dependent on one's contributions to society. We can slide into elitism in which those that contribute more are treated differently than those that do not which creates special privileges. A doctor contributes more than a starving African child. The doctor has a higher statistical chances of making a difference than a child growing up in Africa. We start to speculate on the outcome of people's futures combined with a risk/reward investment method. This can lead to people seeing an investment in crisis aid as worthless compared to prioritizing resources to ensure those that contribute more can do so. Keeping doctors healthy, up to date with developing medical science and procedures vs the chance any individual African child turning out to be as productive.
BSM1
What? Me worry?
Absolutely not. Revenge makes us no better than those that harmed us. I have no problem with extermination to prevent an incident or to legally conclude the perpetrator's life.
BSM1
What? Me worry?
The UN Declaration of Human rights covers my position. Sadly, @BSM1 it covers everyone. I'm also inclined to go along with the view that @Quintessence outlined and don't limit this to the human race, although if I want to put in a new hot tub, a tree is going to go.
I think, overall, when we vilify the monsters among us, we only serve to perpetuate the monstrosity. Yes, we can be horrified, but I believe they stand out, as a reminder, of what we are capable of both individually and en masse.
I missed this somewhere. You might have to re-educate me.
Waaaay too esoteric. Could you maybe come up with something that just involves branches?
Akivah
Well-Known Member
Yes, all people have some basic measure of worth. Since G-d creates all humans with a Divine Spark, we all have a bit of the Divine in us.
Value? An average adult would have about 0.2 grammes of gold in their makeup. Others elements/chemicals bring the total value up to around $4.50 in raw material's.
Most people are worth more than that in their usefulness to everyday life. For some the $4.50 seems a bit steep.
As to justification for killing... Never without legal recourse and even then morality may have something to say about it.
WalterTrull
Godfella
Yes, No, We are one.
@Sunstone I would maintain that not only do all people have "some" intrinsic worth or value (irrespective of their social standing, ethnicity, sex, orientation or even their crimes etc.) but more importantly they have an equal value and this belief distinguishes civilized societies from uncivilized ones characterised by some kind of class, gender or race based apartheid. I would even extend that to states which permit capital punishment for grave criminals. I view this as a violation of human dignity, since these people still have value as human beings even if they have committed heinous acts and deserve a life behind bars.
I think we should show preferential compassion towards the weaker members of society, both directly through personal charitable donations or voluntary work and indirectly through generous taxpayer-funded social welfare programmes and foreign aid at the state-level, simply because they need our help more - not because the rich and powerful are worth any less as individuals (its just that they can better fend for themselves).
What I absolutely detest though - above everything else, every other ideology - is social darwinism: the idea that society is all about dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest in which the weak are considered a useless burden, a drain on the profits of the powerful.
This is one of the areas where I believe Christianity really excelled the classical philosophical worldview, which is often commended (rightly for a lot of reasons, for instance in terms of rationalism), though crucially not in this regard.
Plato and Aristotle believed in the natural inequality of people. As an example, consider Aristotle's Politics (350 BCE) from The Internet Classics Archive:
This was actually the conventional understanding in the classical world (the Epicureans notwithstanding as a commendable exception): that by nature, some people are innately superior to others and have the right to exploit lesser people for their own benefit or pleasure.
Plato, likewise, concurred. In his Republic (375 B.C.), he theorized about his ideal state being founded on a foundation of inequality, requiring that different people assume roles appropriate to their innate level of quality, even going so far as to speak about: “inferior members of the human race" (495c) and to “inferior kinds of people” (545a), arguing that if “a small, bald metalworker” happened to accidentally get rich and married “his master’s daughter,” their defective offspring would only be “second-rate half-breeds” (496a). Plato therefore argued that philosophy “should only be practiced by men of true pedigree, not by b-astard-s” (535c), which takes him to the conclusion that we should ideally prohibit the lower orders of human from reproducing: “sex should preferably take place between men and women who are outstandingly good, and should occur as little as possible between men and women of a vastly inferior stamp. [. . .] This is how to maximize the potential of our flock” (459d-e).
For Plato, Aristotle and their mentor Socrates, the end result was that the government should care for the health of the strong, the weak should be left to die and those with little intelligence should be killed, to quote again from Plato's Republic:
To demonstrate just how widely shared their views were among Romans, of all philosophical schools, just consider the great Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65), a contemporary of Jesus Christ and his thoughts on, um, this topic:
One might be horrified to read the most prominent Stoic of his day say such things, given that Stoics believed in the universality of the logos (reason), but he wasn't saying anything controversial: his was the mainstream societal view, the Christians were the aberrant ones who preached compassion for the deformed, disabled and weak, and who opposed infanticide of so-called "defective" children. The following statement of Jesus would have been shocking - utterly shocking - to many educated upper-class patrician Romans raised with traditional Platonic and Aristotelian values:
But those are my values: the values espoused by Jesus and Paul, not those of Plato or Aristotle (intellectually brilliant as they were in other areas).
This had applicability in the recent past too, obviously, in relation to Nazi Germany - which admired the ancient Spartans and revived those primitive beliefs about natural inequality between different classes of human.
During the Second World War, the Catholic Church protested against the T-4 Nazi "euthanasia" programme, under which those deemed "racially unfit" were to be killed:
Nazi euthanasia and the Catholic Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here's a quote from the German Bishop's letter:
"...For years a war has raged in our Fatherland against Christianity and the Church, and has never been conducted with such bitterness. Repeatedly the German bishops have asked the Reich Government to discontinue this fatal struggle; but unfortunately our appeals and our endeavours were without success...
We demand juridical proof of all sentences and release of all fellow citizens who have been deprived of their liberty without proof...
Every man has the natural right to life and the goods essential for living. The living God, the Creator of all life, is sole master over life and death. With deep horror Christian Germans have learned that, by order of the State authorities, numerous insane persons, entrusted to asylums and institutions, were destroyed as so-called "unproductive citizens."
At present a large-scale campaign is being made for the killing of incurables through a film recommended by the authorities and designed to calm the conscience through appeals to pity. We German Bishops shall not cease to protest against the killing of innocent persons. Nobody's life is safe unless the Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," is observed..."
- German Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter of 22 March 1942
I think we always have to be vigilant about the proliferation of such abhorrent views, which sadly didn't die with Nazism.
I think we should show preferential compassion towards the weaker members of society, both directly through personal charitable donations or voluntary work and indirectly through generous taxpayer-funded social welfare programmes and foreign aid at the state-level, simply because they need our help more - not because the rich and powerful are worth any less as individuals (its just that they can better fend for themselves).
What I absolutely detest though - above everything else, every other ideology - is social darwinism: the idea that society is all about dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest in which the weak are considered a useless burden, a drain on the profits of the powerful.
This is one of the areas where I believe Christianity really excelled the classical philosophical worldview, which is often commended (rightly for a lot of reasons, for instance in terms of rationalism), though crucially not in this regard.
Plato and Aristotle believed in the natural inequality of people. As an example, consider Aristotle's Politics (350 BCE) from The Internet Classics Archive:
… The rule of a master over the slave by nature is exercised primarily with a view to the interest of the master...
[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.
… [T]he lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master...And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different.
[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.
… [T]he lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master...And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different.
This was actually the conventional understanding in the classical world (the Epicureans notwithstanding as a commendable exception): that by nature, some people are innately superior to others and have the right to exploit lesser people for their own benefit or pleasure.
Plato, likewise, concurred. In his Republic (375 B.C.), he theorized about his ideal state being founded on a foundation of inequality, requiring that different people assume roles appropriate to their innate level of quality, even going so far as to speak about: “inferior members of the human race" (495c) and to “inferior kinds of people” (545a), arguing that if “a small, bald metalworker” happened to accidentally get rich and married “his master’s daughter,” their defective offspring would only be “second-rate half-breeds” (496a). Plato therefore argued that philosophy “should only be practiced by men of true pedigree, not by b-astard-s” (535c), which takes him to the conclusion that we should ideally prohibit the lower orders of human from reproducing: “sex should preferably take place between men and women who are outstandingly good, and should occur as little as possible between men and women of a vastly inferior stamp. [. . .] This is how to maximize the potential of our flock” (459d-e).
For Plato, Aristotle and their mentor Socrates, the end result was that the government should care for the health of the strong, the weak should be left to die and those with little intelligence should be killed, to quote again from Plato's Republic:
Socrates:[9] These two practices [legal and medical] will treat the bodies and minds of those of your citizens who are naturally well endowed in these respects; as for the rest, those with a poor physical constitution will be allowed to die, and those with irredeemably rotten minds will be put to death. Right?
Glaucon: Yes, we’ve shown that this is the best course for those at the receiving end of the treatment as well as for the community.(409e-410a)
Glaucon: Yes, we’ve shown that this is the best course for those at the receiving end of the treatment as well as for the community.(409e-410a)
To demonstrate just how widely shared their views were among Romans, of all philosophical schools, just consider the great Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65), a contemporary of Jesus Christ and his thoughts on, um, this topic:
"We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason - to separate the sound from the worthless"
- (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (1995). Seneca: Moral and Political Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 32. ISBN 0-5213-4818-8. Retrieved November 2, 2013.)
- (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (1995). Seneca: Moral and Political Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 32. ISBN 0-5213-4818-8. Retrieved November 2, 2013.)
One might be horrified to read the most prominent Stoic of his day say such things, given that Stoics believed in the universality of the logos (reason), but he wasn't saying anything controversial: his was the mainstream societal view, the Christians were the aberrant ones who preached compassion for the deformed, disabled and weak, and who opposed infanticide of so-called "defective" children. The following statement of Jesus would have been shocking - utterly shocking - to many educated upper-class patrician Romans raised with traditional Platonic and Aristotelian values:
Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you" (Luke 14:12-14)
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:11)
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:11)
But those are my values: the values espoused by Jesus and Paul, not those of Plato or Aristotle (intellectually brilliant as they were in other areas).
This had applicability in the recent past too, obviously, in relation to Nazi Germany - which admired the ancient Spartans and revived those primitive beliefs about natural inequality between different classes of human.
During the Second World War, the Catholic Church protested against the T-4 Nazi "euthanasia" programme, under which those deemed "racially unfit" were to be killed:
Nazi euthanasia and the Catholic Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
During the Second World War, the Roman Catholic Church protested against the T-4 Nazi "euthanasia" programme, under which those deemed "racially unfit" were to be killed. The protests formed one of the most significant public acts of Catholic resistance to Nazism undertaken within Germany. The programme began in 1939, and ultimately resulted in the murder of more than 70,000 people who were senile, mentally handicapped, mentally ill, epileptics, cripples, children with Down's Syndrome or people with similar afflictions.
Catholic protests began in the summer of 1940. The Holy See declared on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to natural and positive Divine law, and that: "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed". In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by Bishop von Galen, whose intervention, according to Richard J. Evans, led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich."[2] In 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the Mystici Corporis Christi encyclical, in which he condemned the practice of killing the disabled. The Encyclical was followed, on 26 September 1943, by an open condemnation from the German Bishops which denounced the killing of "innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped, incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages, and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent"...
"The sensation created by the sermons", wrote Evans, "was enormous".[12] Kershaw characterised Von Galen's 1941 "open attack" on the government's euthanasia program as a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism".[13] According to Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state.
There were demonstrations across Catholic Germany - Hitler himself faced angry demonstrators at Nuremberg, the only time he was confronted with such resistance by ordinary Germans.[7] The regime did not halt the murders, but took the program underground.[17]
Catholic protests began in the summer of 1940. The Holy See declared on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to natural and positive Divine law, and that: "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed". In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by Bishop von Galen, whose intervention, according to Richard J. Evans, led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich."[2] In 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the Mystici Corporis Christi encyclical, in which he condemned the practice of killing the disabled. The Encyclical was followed, on 26 September 1943, by an open condemnation from the German Bishops which denounced the killing of "innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped, incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages, and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent"...
"The sensation created by the sermons", wrote Evans, "was enormous".[12] Kershaw characterised Von Galen's 1941 "open attack" on the government's euthanasia program as a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism".[13] According to Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state.
There were demonstrations across Catholic Germany - Hitler himself faced angry demonstrators at Nuremberg, the only time he was confronted with such resistance by ordinary Germans.[7] The regime did not halt the murders, but took the program underground.[17]
Here's a quote from the German Bishop's letter:
"...For years a war has raged in our Fatherland against Christianity and the Church, and has never been conducted with such bitterness. Repeatedly the German bishops have asked the Reich Government to discontinue this fatal struggle; but unfortunately our appeals and our endeavours were without success...
We demand juridical proof of all sentences and release of all fellow citizens who have been deprived of their liberty without proof...
Every man has the natural right to life and the goods essential for living. The living God, the Creator of all life, is sole master over life and death. With deep horror Christian Germans have learned that, by order of the State authorities, numerous insane persons, entrusted to asylums and institutions, were destroyed as so-called "unproductive citizens."
At present a large-scale campaign is being made for the killing of incurables through a film recommended by the authorities and designed to calm the conscience through appeals to pity. We German Bishops shall not cease to protest against the killing of innocent persons. Nobody's life is safe unless the Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," is observed..."
- German Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter of 22 March 1942
Last edited:
GreenpeaceRECo-operative
Darwin and others missed George Fox of the Quakers
I have hundreds of trees on my property. If I cut one down, 20 more will begin growing elsewhere on the acreage the following spring.
Well, that´s a darntootin´sustainable yield right there, that is!
GreenpeaceRECo-operative
Darwin and others missed George Fox of the Quakers
One might be horrified to read the most prominent Stoic of his day say such things, given that Stoics believed in the universality of the logos (reason), but he wasn't saying anything controversial: his was the mainstream societal view, the Christians were the aberrant ones who preached compassion for the deformed, disabled and weak, and who opposed infanticide of so-called "defective" children. The following statement of Jesus would have been shocking - utterly shocking - to many educated upper-class patrician Romans raised with traditional Platonic and Aristotelian values:
But those are my values: the values espoused by Jesus and Paul, not those of Plato or Aristotle (intellectually brilliant as they were in other areas).
This had applicability in the recent past too, obviously, in relation to Nazi Germany - which admired the ancient Spartans and revived those primitive beliefs about natural inequality between different classes of human.
During the Second World War, the Catholic Church protested against the T-4 Nazi "euthanasia" programme, under which those deemed "racially unfit" were to be killed:
Nazi euthanasia and the Catholic Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here's a quote from the German Bishop's letter:
"...For years a war has raged in our Fatherland against Christianity and the Church, and has never been conducted with such bitterness. Repeatedly the German bishops have asked the Reich Government to discontinue this fatal struggle; but unfortunately our appeals and our endeavours were without success...
We demand juridical proof of all sentences and release of all fellow citizens who have been deprived of their liberty without proof...
Every man has the natural right to life and the goods essential for living. The living God, the Creator of all life, is sole master over life and death. With deep horror Christian Germans have learned that, by order of the State authorities, numerous insane persons, entrusted to asylums and institutions, were destroyed as so-called "unproductive citizens."
At present a large-scale campaign is being made for the killing of incurables through a film recommended by the authorities and designed to calm the conscience through appeals to pity. We German Bishops shall not cease to protest against the killing of innocent persons. Nobody's life is safe unless the Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," is observed..."
- German Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter of 22 March 1942
I think we always have to be vigilant about the proliferation of such abhorrent views, which sadly didn't die with Nazism.[/QUOTE]
Brilliant coverage of some fascinating aspects of ethical, and spiritual, history which has natural implications for the present. The inherent supremacism of the Greeks is a noteworthy contrast with Jesus, and makes a fine consideration in evaluating the nature of "secularization." I´m circling around something like "No secular culture, nor Christian doctrines, without foundations in their ethical essentials, and their historical link to a Higher Power, and an empirical formulation of that divine connection and relationship."
Jesus said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you" (Luke 14:12-14)
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:11)
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28)
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:11)
But those are my values: the values espoused by Jesus and Paul, not those of Plato or Aristotle (intellectually brilliant as they were in other areas).
This had applicability in the recent past too, obviously, in relation to Nazi Germany - which admired the ancient Spartans and revived those primitive beliefs about natural inequality between different classes of human.
During the Second World War, the Catholic Church protested against the T-4 Nazi "euthanasia" programme, under which those deemed "racially unfit" were to be killed:
Nazi euthanasia and the Catholic Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
During the Second World War, the Roman Catholic Church protested against the T-4 Nazi "euthanasia" programme, under which those deemed "racially unfit" were to be killed. The protests formed one of the most significant public acts of Catholic resistance to Nazism undertaken within Germany. The programme began in 1939, and ultimately resulted in the murder of more than 70,000 people who were senile, mentally handicapped, mentally ill, epileptics, cripples, children with Down's Syndrome or people with similar afflictions.
Catholic protests began in the summer of 1940. The Holy See declared on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to natural and positive Divine law, and that: "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed". In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by Bishop von Galen, whose intervention, according to Richard J. Evans, led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich."[2] In 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the Mystici Corporis Christi encyclical, in which he condemned the practice of killing the disabled. The Encyclical was followed, on 26 September 1943, by an open condemnation from the German Bishops which denounced the killing of "innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped, incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages, and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent"...
"The sensation created by the sermons", wrote Evans, "was enormous".[12] Kershaw characterised Von Galen's 1941 "open attack" on the government's euthanasia program as a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism".[13] According to Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state.
There were demonstrations across Catholic Germany - Hitler himself faced angry demonstrators at Nuremberg, the only time he was confronted with such resistance by ordinary Germans.[7] The regime did not halt the murders, but took the program underground.[17]
Catholic protests began in the summer of 1940. The Holy See declared on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to natural and positive Divine law, and that: "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed". In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by Bishop von Galen, whose intervention, according to Richard J. Evans, led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich."[2] In 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the Mystici Corporis Christi encyclical, in which he condemned the practice of killing the disabled. The Encyclical was followed, on 26 September 1943, by an open condemnation from the German Bishops which denounced the killing of "innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped, incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages, and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent"...
"The sensation created by the sermons", wrote Evans, "was enormous".[12] Kershaw characterised Von Galen's 1941 "open attack" on the government's euthanasia program as a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism".[13] According to Gill, "Galen used his condemnation of this appalling policy to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the Nazi state.
There were demonstrations across Catholic Germany - Hitler himself faced angry demonstrators at Nuremberg, the only time he was confronted with such resistance by ordinary Germans.[7] The regime did not halt the murders, but took the program underground.[17]
Here's a quote from the German Bishop's letter:
"...For years a war has raged in our Fatherland against Christianity and the Church, and has never been conducted with such bitterness. Repeatedly the German bishops have asked the Reich Government to discontinue this fatal struggle; but unfortunately our appeals and our endeavours were without success...
We demand juridical proof of all sentences and release of all fellow citizens who have been deprived of their liberty without proof...
Every man has the natural right to life and the goods essential for living. The living God, the Creator of all life, is sole master over life and death. With deep horror Christian Germans have learned that, by order of the State authorities, numerous insane persons, entrusted to asylums and institutions, were destroyed as so-called "unproductive citizens."
At present a large-scale campaign is being made for the killing of incurables through a film recommended by the authorities and designed to calm the conscience through appeals to pity. We German Bishops shall not cease to protest against the killing of innocent persons. Nobody's life is safe unless the Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," is observed..."
- German Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter of 22 March 1942
Brilliant coverage of some fascinating aspects of ethical, and spiritual, history which has natural implications for the present. The inherent supremacism of the Greeks is a noteworthy contrast with Jesus, and makes a fine consideration in evaluating the nature of "secularization." I´m circling around something like "No secular culture, nor Christian doctrines, without foundations in their ethical essentials, and their historical link to a Higher Power, and an empirical formulation of that divine connection and relationship."
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
The moment you start judging people based on their utility is the moment you invite dictatorship and lessen your own rights to freedom. If you imply that all people do have intrinsic worth, you'll start looking to solve societal problems, that no one would otherwise do, and create a civil environment. The focus in our system has always been on output and performance, instead of growing potential good. Some people seem to want to live with sacrificing human rights for all, to live in a competitive jungle that only breeds hostility and crime. The power of exclusion, only turns in on itself.
Beautifully put Osgart!
I've heard it said that there is none so evil that they aren't capable of doing good and there are none so good that they aren't capable of doing evil.
the potential is always there to do otherwise than what one has done.
All people have innate worth.
I believe that because G-d tells us so; both in His Torah and our universal recognition of murder as wrong. No human believes murder is acceptable although we may not agree on what constitutes murder.
If we cannot agree on what constitutes murder, how can we possibly have universal recognition that it is wrong...and still have a word that means anything significant?