NT Wright: Why Steven Pinker is wrong about the foundation of human rights

47 thoughts on “NT Wright: Why Steven Pinker is wrong about the foundation of human rights”

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2. Even if we conceded that Paul was the main reason that humanitarian/egalitarian morals emerged (and I'm not entirely convinced), why is the dogma/supernatural belief important for the future? Couldn't we just say that religion was a tool to allow a more primitive people to realize their connectedness, and now science has proven it, and in the future, we can keep the Golden Rule we gleaned from religion and move on without all the mumbo-jumbo, woo-woo?

3. Its really funny that he said that, Christianity wasn't about "Human Rights" , it was about "Male Christian Rights and Things that they care about". The hell is he on about, the Christian faith didn't care two dimes about the rest, that is why they kept trying to convert everyone , because well the alternatively would have been no rights for the "rest". Universal Human Rights as we know it , is unequivocally a product of the enlightenment. DEAL WITH IT, stop trying to slap your name on every good thing in the world today just to appear relevant again, GROW UP little guy.

4. Morals and human rights ARE NOT rooted in Christianity or religion – empathy is human instinct way before language let alone Moses. Also! PLEASE READ THE BIBLE! It’s teachings are more often than not antithetical to empathy, human rights and morals.

5. where are the human rights for women in the bible and the quran? not there….the god of Abraham is a murderer, misogynistic, male created and benefited cult created in a time where people were ignorant and superstitious. Time to leave it in the past as history

6. the "scholar" contradicts himself. The US is the place you get secular values playing out. Its just that theres something else at play with americas religiosity. but what about europe and the uk, well one distinction is monarchy or in americas case lack of it and its gun hoe attitude for religiosity. religious people find ANY and all reason they can to point to judeo christian values, though they always forget to mention the 10,000 years before these values manifest to any meaningful extent. whilst simultaneously excluding greece, byzantine, and all other cultures that managed to forward society and build without any judaeo or christian understanding. this fallacy that continues is as see through as a gid that doesnt appear or show up, hang out or fulfil any of the physical natures he himself created.

7. Please direct me to Bible verse spelling out Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom to Assemble.

8. Modern Christianity is basically just sub-standard leftism; globalism, open borders, anti-white etc

9. We humans are all one species, related to all life through a successful line of ancestors going back almost 4 billion years.

   Life is the most precious thing we have. It is so very fragile.

   After 4 billion years of evolution to think that we are defined by a muddled set of claims based on poorly remembered and poorly documented events is ridiculous.

   Christians need to wake up and grow up. You’re like children under a spell. It’s somewhat pathetic.

10. God saved my life. In all sincerity. In the darkest time of my life is when I found my faith. I can't explain it and I don't expect anybody to believe, but I have no doubt anymore and now all I want is to be a light in this world.

11. Read Carl Jung

12. I Alone am the author and creator of rights. Without me, no one comes to any truth.
    I am GOD…. Mr. Condemnation

13. Though human rights came from Christianity(I disagree), the concept of Christianity is not religion itself. It is so broad sense that the meaning or it is almost the same as 'culture'. You should distinguish the broad sense of Christianity from the narrow sense of it, religion itself.

14. I am unconvinced that all ideas that originate in a land that was founded by judeo christians, owes its foundations to judeo christian values. There are so many reasons why ideas can flow from different cultures or paradigms.

15. The bible certainly, and at least the the three books of the Abraham family, are most definitely not a good measure of moral code…or at least only if you ignore all of the bigoted atrocities. Bad argument and clearly not true.

16. Religion is the base of cultural moral. The moral is the base of modern justice. Like it or not.
    Have a look into the sayings of the world religions.
    Jesus was a hippie. Mohammed a warrior. Like it or not. If a moslem feels offended by this he is part of the problem.

17. It's the bias behind both atheist and theist that make it hard for me to move away from agnosticism. Its like watching political partisans explain to you why they're correct.

18. What is actually happening in America is excellent. Thinking the media, and universities are the majority is moronic. Trump is proof of that. Main stream media barely breaks 1 million viewers. you have to walk around America to know what your talking about.

19. The sheer concept of rights was invented in 1762 as a consequence of the Peace of Westphalia that for the first time in european history prescribed the principle of non-interference and thereby broke the religious principle of one truth. That paved the way to the nation state and laws shaped by common interest. Two strains of religious fundamentalism mass murdered europeans in countless wars and civil wars since reformations were attempted and failed before that principle of non-intervention was codified in 1648. There is no civil right or human right that did not emerge from that, and it was the defeat of religion due to the christian split that brought the principles of rights into existence. This happened in Europe and the colonies were left behind since they were the only regions where one of the fundamentalist strains dominanted. For that reason in the anglosphere people share the delusion that christianity was reformed successfully, which never happened. It was Europe, where democracy emerged, Europe, where the concept of equal rights and political participation emerged, Europ, where human rights became a standard. The US failed totally because it was a protestant shithole, where the root cause of the european development couldn't take place. Sorry, guys, but you and the muslims are the least people on earth to get it.

20. Human Rights started in the New Testament ? That's a great one LMAO… Have these Wombles read the actual thing ? Jesus is a Dictator ! Read the book of Revelation. His second coming is a blood bath for everyone that doesn't accept him as their Lord & Savior…Paul is homophobic & a misogynist & thought sex beneath him. There's no Slavery abolition movement in Paul writings …. Finally, there's no evidence, any of these NT Biblical characters actually existed, outside of theological history… It's all made up by Roman writers…As for Jordan Peterson?….Don't get me started !

21. ‘They has to be THOUGHT how to love god’ ? that’s a nice way of putting what happened

22. ‘They has to be THOUGHT how to love god’ ? that’s a nice way of putting what happened

23. NT Wright is out of his mind. The church stifled human rights as long as it could.

24. Pinker is a world class Scientist,what Scientific training does Wright have who has been refuted by Dr Richard Carrier….
    He is a self deluded man who lies like all Theists

25. Took him all of 20 seconds to erect a straw man. Props.

26. Human Rights was created after the second world war.

27. The bible argues for slavery in the 10 commandments. It does not recognise common humanity. Those who make these frankly ludicrous claims about human rights descending from Christianity do so on the basis of a sanitised post democracy and human rights reading of the Bible. The notion of human rights is absolutely at conflict with any version of biblical theology. Rights are grant from a law giving body which can be appealed to. How does one appeal to God? Through a priest, a church, prayer perhaps? It’s just ludicrous!

28. The Vatican has yet to recognize the UN Charta of Human Rights.

29. Seems like those two forgot all about the ancient Greeks or Buddha.
    Having revolutionary ideas isn't about being christian, but about understanding the fundamental human-ness that we all share.
    Christianity is just another beliefsystem, trying to claim superiority, just because it was the dominant one right when critical thinking started to become possible in the persecuted and tortured population of the last hundred years.
    But just as most other religions it suffers from egocentrism and the need to be right.

    Those two just rationalise their belief, they don't question their assumptions enough.

30. Isn't Pinker mates with Jeffrey Epstein and that clique of dodgy types? Might explain his anti human rights rhetoric.

31. Without God, everything is permitted

32. Human rights was Thomas Paine's idea and I think I'll stick with Pinker's view on the subject.

33. God's very nature is the objective source of human rights. Because if you say our laws/society is the source. Then that's not a right, that's an opinion. Which is no better than anyone else's opinion. A right is something someone has regardless of how many others disagree. To say our laws are the source, is to say that if a dictator came and changed the law or a majority vote changed it your rights would suddenly disappear. No one would advocate that. And it gets worse from there. What about other countries laws that were opposite of yours? Like Nazi Germany? So, if you say our law is the source for rights then you agree that what the Nazi's did wasn't really wrong. It's just your opinion it was wrong. Unless you can draw from a source that is beyond us, it's just an opinion. You need something higher than us to say that those who were captured by the Nazi's had their human rights violated, because according to the Nazi's, they weren't violating anything. They were exterminating something that was less than human so the rest of the actual human race wouldn't be polluted by their sub human genes. That's the only way Hitler could convince his men to do what they did. Make them less than human. Therfore they have no rights and can be treated as such…

    So in conclusion, who said so and by what authority do you say you have rights? You? Your friends? Your own laws? How do you determine that a line is crooked unless you have some idea of what a straight line looks like? What's your source for human rights? The closer our actions conform to God's nature the better it is. The further our actions conform, the worse it is. So no matter what side of the isle you stand on (God exists/God doesn't exist), without God you have no rights. End of story.

34. what? 00:12…what planet is this guy living on. The US is a perfect example of why religion poisons everything, the US is 85% religious and yes, look at it, we are controlled by the Christian right. Read this: The Darkening Age, The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

35. Unbelievable? Yes.

36. Get John N Gray on!

37. This is patent nonsense, how on earth did man survive before the peasant revelations of the bible 2000 years ago. Humanity would have soon become extinct if the human rights of others were not respected.

38. it is impressive to judge by the comments as atheists are dumb in not understanding the moral argument.

39. How do you know Jesus walked on water changed water into wine cast demons into pigs how do you know what those writers wrote down at the time is true ???

40. Most current judeochristian cultural norms from which enlightenment arose was based on British ideals that was always ahead of the rest of Europe since the magna carta and the belief that an should be judged by his peers (an Anglo-Saxon legal system). The advancements throughout the centuries based on the rights of parliament over monarchy, the rights of individuals within the law of the land, the freedom of speech, the belief in science, the belief in rationality, the abolition movement, education, etc. all fundamentally came from Christianity. These all existed and were acknowledged by the rest of the west as key to Britain being the engine of the world (military might, industrialisation, production, the greatest promoter of free trade, etc.). Then the enlightenment took off and pushed forward ideas that already existed in Britain. To say it had nothing to do with religion shows remarkable ignorance or wilful dismissal of history.

41. Paul got his ideas for the body of christ from Plato's Republic.

42. England is over, apparently…. ?

43. Whatever rights we may have at law have been gained by struggling against authority… this includes struggling against the power of the church.

    There is no such thing as human rights… rather we have rights which vary from country to country that have been reluctantly conceded by the principalities and powers that be.

    These rights have not been won through victimhood but by struggle.. a struggle that never ends… govts and religions always want to claw back these hard fought for freedoms.

44. The church does not nor has it ever stood for a globalized humanity. It is divisive even unto itself with its sectarianism and it's nationalism. "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free" is the perfect bastardization of the so called Christian hypothesis of humanity in all. And to say that human rights, and dignity and respect for another sojurner's humanity is rooted in Judeo Christian theology and without the "spiritual root" all you are left with is everyone claiming victimhood is utter nonsense. Love is a choice, and there are those who make the choice to love and promote love among all mankind, but it doesn't start with the worship of anyone else's idols: Moses and Jesus and Mohammad and Buddah for examples. It is a choice made independently of religious ideologies that have always had a history of "conquering and dividing". The great cause of true communism will ultimately triumph, but none of us will live to see it. There are still too many Bishop Wright's in the world in love with their idols: in this case some resurrected phantom living up in the sky who will come to judge the living and the dead, the wheat and the weeds, the just and the unjust and so the division continues.

45. George Carlin said we don't have rights, we have privileges, rights aren't rights if someone can take them away.

46. "…Human rights come from Judeo-Christian values…"

    BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

47. The bible is probably the most violent and immoral book that exists

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