There is nothing like a durable idea of a universal Deity among the various paganisms, leading to the idea of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, as there was in Prophetic Judaism. My point is that we cannot ignore the matrix out of which developed the idea of human rights, citizenship, parliamentarianism, and so forth, without jeopardizing these things themselves.
Questionable. Very questionable. You can't conceive of rational reasons for preferring the idealogical basis of Western democracy without religion?
Come now, Neo, you're much smarter than that. The justifications for things such as rule of law, democracy, equal rights, freedom of speech, press, religion, association, etc. are commonly secular and not religious.
And, yes, you could throw away any part religion may have played in their history and they could still stand by themselves.
This is nothing but a variant of the "Christian nation" argument. |
