Just Talking Nonsense

There's an odd and contradictory juxtaposition of opinions currently manifesting itself among contemporary progressives. On one hand, progressives have been insisting for decades that religious belief has no place in public affairs, that matters of policy should be free of any religious justification.

Yet, on the other hand, we're also being told by progressives in the media, who are largely secular folk, that the conditions of migrants on the border are inexcusable, unjustifiable and a moral stain on the country.

The reason this is odd is because secularists generally adopt a worldview, either tacitly or explicitly, of metaphysical naturalism, and, given naturalism, deploring the treatment of an unfortunate group of people is merely an expression of one's subjective preference. There's nothing objectively wrong with mistreating others, yet, just as most secular progressives would blanch at the treatment received by Untouchables in Indian society, and declare that treatment to be highly immoral, they contend that the miserable conditions on the border are immoral as well.

But when naturalists make a moral judgment, which they're implicitly doing when they express their outrage over the conditions in which migrants are held on the border, they're actually committing ethical plagiarism on theism.

Nothing in the naturalistic worldview gives its adherents a basis for making moral pronouncements. They feel strongly that what's happening is profoundly wrong, yet it can only be wrong if theism is true, so they surreptitiously free-load off of theism to proclaim their moral judgments while at the same time paying lip-service to the principle that religious views have no place in deciding political matters.

What basis is there, after all, for umbrage that migrants are being shorn of their dignity, if, as naturalism presupposes, human beings have no dignity in the first place.

Steven Pinker at Yale calls dignity a "stupid concept." Bioethicist Ruth Macklin calls it "useless," and, on naturalism, they're both right.

Human dignity exists only because men and women are created in the image of God and loved by God. If that's not true then as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared:

When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.

Or as the great cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote:

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.

Of course, some of the progressive talking heads and scribblers may in fact be devout Christians or pious Jews who are basing their moral assessment on the obligation imposed upon us by God to love our neighbors as we love ourselves and to treat them justly, i.e. with dignity, but, if so, they're tacitly importing their religion into the public arena, an act of smuggling which they and their colleagues insist must be prohibited, at least when attempted by conservatives.

So, either we scrub the public square of anything that carries the scent of religious belief and shut up about the horrible conditions of the migrants in the detention camps, or we allow denunciations of those conditions to be piggy-backed into the public square on the shoulders of theistic assumptions about the dignity and worth of human beings.

Otherwise, we're just talking nonsense every time we make a moral judgment about how other people are being treated.