April 23, 2002

Chesterton on created equal

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." - G.K. Chesterton, 1922.

"Christianity has always asserted the equal worth of all human souls, and this belief has inspired many of the great humanitarian achievements in Western history, such as the abolition of the slave trade. Science, of course, can neither prove nor disprove spiritual equality. That would be a defect in a scientific theory, but it is a blessing in a religious doctrine. Darwinism, however, made the whole of Christianity seem outdated. The new prestige of evolutionary biology encouraged egalitarians to discard that corny creed of spiritual equality and instead assert the shiny new scientific hypothesis that humans are physically and mentally uniform. But that, paradoxically, put progressive egalitarians on a collision course with Darwinian science . . . because Darwin’s theory of natural selection requires hereditary differences. That's what natural selection selects: those genetic variations that happen to reproduce themselves more than their genetic rivals in a particular environment. To talk about hereditary differences, however, is to talk about the political hot potato of “race.” For there is no bright line between “family” and “race.” A race is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some extent. Note the full title of Darwin’s big book:
The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." - Steve Sailer, Thatcher Presentation, 1999

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