Dear Friends,
It seems to me that the concept human equality is a relatively new phenomenon. In the annuls of human history, there have been many steps made towards this ultimate concept, or philosophical breakthrough. Each a step in the right direction with a few stumbles along the way. The concept of Human Equality however, is extraordinary in that it has led to the largest, fastest increase in the material welfare of Mankind that there has ever been. It would be a shame to discard such a useful concept and replace it with an outmoded one that would set us back a few thousand years in philosophical advancement. Our toys would be our downfall if this were the case.
Perhaps the first written step was the Upanishads from Hindu theocracy. While it ushered in the concept of man’s immortality, and an escalating status each rebirth offered, depending on the virtue that an individual showed in his or her past lives. This was an important first step. It started men thinking about virtue and how their actions interacted with society. But it also had within it’s cannon that not all people are equal. There was, and still is, the caste system. A person born to a lower caste is less than a person born to a higher caste thus it’s cannon codifies people as less than equal.
Confucius coined the tern, as it has been variously translated, Human Heartedness. This new philosophical concept, (from 550 BC), had as one of it’s three legs, the Golden Rule. Confucius may have been the first teacher to introduce the idea of the Golden Rule. But even Confucius believed that those born to the aristocracy were born to lead while those born to peasants were born to farm. Another leg of Human heartedness is that people should be content in their status. This idea calls attention to the fact that not all are born equal under Confucianism. There is the aristocrat, the emperor and the peasant each should be content in his or her place.
The civilized world has a debt to Islam, in that the Islamic wars of expansion and depredations forced most of the civilized people to retreat to Europe, massing the World’s civilization in one place and thus setting up the conditions for the Renaissance. Which otherwise may have taken another thousand years or maybe never would have occurred at all. But in Sharia Christians and Jews are considered Dhimini. A lowered status, that essentially means, diminished human. The Dhimini must pay the dhimini tax or the jizya, (ransom themselves and their children to the Islamic State), else they can be raped, murdered, enslaved or anything else the Sultan or Islamic ruler thinks appropriate… (those of other faiths have no human status under Sharia). So, there is a codification that not all people are equal, within Islamic cannon, political, and personal laws.
The only prophet to say, explicitly, that all people are equal… is Jesus Christ. He put in many ways, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Look not at the mote in your neighbor’s eye but the plank in your own,” and “Judge not lest thee shall be judged,” along with many others. The very nature of Christ’s message is the call for the true Christian to have love in his or her heart, even for those that are your enemies. Jesus did not qualify or modify his statements of equality and love; he made them universals.
While Christianity has been accused of atrocities, it is clear that the atrocities that Christians have been accused of, are in direct contravention to the values codified by Jesus Christ. There is no question in my mind that Jesus weeps whenever a sin is committed in his name. If the subject of a Republic, does the opposite of what his law orders him to do, is it the Republic’s fault, or the subject‘s?
At the garden of Gethsemane, the greatest burden for Jesus was that, not all of us could be saved by his singular act of virtue… dieing on a cross for our sins. This weighed most heavily on his heart. Not the coming pain, degradation and death. It was his compassion for us that was the hardest to bear. Knowing many of us would fall under the spell of false prophets, and millions of us would be enslaved, tortured, raped, robbed, castrated and simply slaughtered by the followers of the various prophets to Baal… was what he found most torturous.
The first codification in political law, of the philosophical concept that all people are created equal, is the United States Constitution. It was the first, and possibly still the only, political document that openly avows the universal equality of every member of the human race. Others modify their statements of equality. Modification means a lowered standard or subset, ie, a red jeep, clumpy soil, soft bed and tough nut, modification by it‘s definition is exclusive not inclusive. Therefore, those that modify their statements of equality, in fact, have no equality at all.
So we can see that it has only been within the last two thousand years, that any religion’s prophet has stated openly and many times, the equality of all people. But it has been only in the last two hundred years that the equality of the human race has been codified in political law. The last hurdle we face is culture. Once our culture not only nods in the direction of equality of the individual, but acts as all people are equal, will the Human Race emerge into a new era of understanding, peace and prosperity.
I wonder… Is class warfare a form of holding all people as equal or as unequal? Therefore is it a step forward or backward?
