I have a raggedy old bear in my son’s room that I’ve had for longer than I can remember. I’m not sure at what age I acquired it, but I’ll never get rid of it. It sports a tiny white T-Shirt that reads “Riggs’ Pub, England,” a small establishment on another continent that shares my last name. No one in their right mind would ever offer me any money for it, but I doubt I’d ever sell him to anyone even if they offered. To me, it’s next to priceless. For everyone else, it’s junk.
Everything in this life only has value if we personally choose to give it value. Gold only has value because people want it, it has no intrinsic value in and of itself. An addict might trade $10,000 worth of gold for a couple hundred dollars worth of drugs because in the moment they desire the fix more than the actual current value of gold. Value is relative.
But you see, if there is no God, then this applies to people as well. Without God people only have the value that another person wishes to give them. You may think highly of yourself and other people, but that’s merely your personal conclusion. If a government wishes to declare that one group of people is without value and that they have no right to live, then this is their priority to do so. There is no arguing or appealing to a higher authority or value system of why people should not be exterminated. The strong will survive and the weak will be wiped from the earth. Take up arms and hope for the best.
If you’ve ever watched the news and shaken your head at the report of a man murdering his own family, then you’re actually appealing to a religious system of values. The man shouldn’t have murdered his own family because his family members have an intrinsic value that he doesn’t have the authority to decide. The value of his family was not decided by society either. Society is only the relative value system of a collective group of people. It might change at any given time.
Not so with God. God provides an absolute value system for all of humanity. Does the pro-life position depend on a religious value system? Absolutely, but so does the call to not murder another human being. We respect others because we respect the inherent value that we did not give them; the value that we recognize.
If you live in America then the Founding Fathers already shoved their religious values down your throat. The Declaration of Independence, the document that sets forth the worldview of the Constitution, puts it like this:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Our very founding document presupposes the existence of a Creator, that we are His creation, and that He bestowed within us certain moral absolutes. This value doesn’t come from society or any individual, but from the transcendent hand from above. This is a religious point of view, a system of religious values.
The opposite of this view can be found in the Humanist Manifesto. It declares that the universe is “self-existing and not created”, that “man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as the result of a continuous process” and there are no moral absolutes because “modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural of cosmic guarantees of human values.”
In short, it’s the exact opposite worldview as that of our founding documents. It’s the worldview that is presupposed when someone decries that you are pushing your religious views on them. It’s the worldview being taught as the norm in every public classroom across America.
Well, if I were you, I’d be very quick to correct people who make such an assumption, because what they’re arguing for is a worldview where people have no value but what others choose to recognize. And minus a few practical arguments of not being caught and sent to jail, there’d be nothing really wrong with them or the government murdering you if they chose to do so.
So I’m a-gonna shove my religious value system that says you’re a precious human person created in the image of God down your throat. I don’t believe humanity is an ultimately worthless blip in an indifferent cosmos waiting for the next natural or man-caused disaster to wipe us out. I believe we are more than that, and you should too if you want to continue to enjoy a country where the government doesn’t have the authority to take away your rights as a human being.
Raw Christianity 