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A Brief History of Individual Rights | National Review
History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American Constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the Enlightenment but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that eight of the thirteen British colonies had official c
... See moreSteven Pinker • Enlightenment Now
Who ever came up with the idea that a human being had “rights” not granted by the state and that could be appealed to against the state? Where did the thought come from that some things are owed to all persons, regardless of their social status, gifts, or abilities, just by virtue of their being human? While it is popularly thought that human right
... See moreTimothy Keller • Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World
When confronting the phenomenon of modern totalitarianism, he argued, “it was impossible any longer to believe that the values of liberal humanism were self-evident.”4 Humanism needed to be grounded in something higher than a purely material account of the universe, and in something more compelling than the hope of a secular utopia. Only religious
... See moreRoss Gregory Douthat • Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics
It varied in form, but its content was fairly uniform: it was an attempt at a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion, common to all nations and cultures, available to all reflective minds without recourse to childish mythologies, ‘revealed’ truth, miracles or abstruse metaphysical systems.
David Bentley Hart • The Story of Christianity
Against the more insane forms of subjectivism in modern times there have been various reactions. First, a half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual. This begins, in its modern form, with Locke, who is as much opposed to “enthusiasm”—the individualism
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