Dominic Verner has written a brief but insightful piece that examines our age's conception of human dignity and rights and how it is divorced from God and his ordering of creation.
He writes:
Humanism is easy, but to its devotees in the ACLU we might pose the
following challenge: What happens when your assertion, your flattering
compliment to our race, is asked to prove its conceptual credentials? As
flattering as it may be, human dignity can become rather inconvenient,
burdensome, and undesirable, because human beings, even innocent ones,
can become inconvenient, burdensome, and undesirable. Can you
demonstrate that human dignity is more than an emotivist flattery?
It is of course, but to make such a demonstration the ACLU will have
to hear something of the rights of God. Our nature does not belong to
Caesar, but neither does it belong to us as individuals. There is only
one who exercises the owner’s right, the right to inscribe the order of
justice into our very nature. If our nature is merely our own, if it is
not a gift from our Creator, then justice, rights, and even “dignity”
remain but artifacts, convenient creations of those possessed of
political might. The only solid foundation for human dignity lies in
this: “we come from God and must return to Him.” Apart from our
belonging to God, human rights are as invented as unicorns, human
dignity as fictitious as witches.
With an anthropology divorced from the order of creation, our modern
day human-rights torch bearers have lost the flame. They could, of
course, ask for a light, but for that they will have to raise their
gaze.
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