Dignity and the UN Declaration

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It takes exactly five words of the Preamble to get to its first declaration, which is the "inherent dignity" of all members of the human family.

The fifth paragraph of the Preamble states: "Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith... in the dignity and worth of the human person...

The First Article states:  "All human beings are born... equal in dignity and rights."

Article 22 asserts: "the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for [the individual's] dignity and the free development of his personality." This suggests a somewhat different meaning of the term dignity, perhaps the outworkings of what "inherent dignity"means in society.


Article 23 states: "...(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection." The meaning is similar here -- the implications of dignity in the ordering of society and the just remuneration of workers.

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Christians and theists have a strong grounding for belief in the dignity of all humans. It is founded and secured in being created by God and being endowed by God with characteristics that in some way reflect God himself -- we are, as the Hebrew sage wisely said, "created in His image".

Darwinists, on the other hand, have no deep grounding for human dignity, and admit as much. They insist that human dignity is a survival trick of mindless, amoral evolution, and nothing more.  They mock us for looking for or expecting something more, something deeper.

So, so much for human dignity. It ain't what it used to be. According to darwinian logic, if self-loathing or blind hatred for others had achieved the same results, we might have been been endued with these instead -- evolution has no goal, no purpose, and certainly no moral sense.

How an impersonal mindless, amoral process could produce something as sublime as a sense of dignity in human beings doesn't trouble the Darwinist -- not in the least, even though they take great pride in being the masters of mechanism. Nor does the sheer implausibility of it trouble them.

To the Darwinian, the fact that a sense of dignity [supposedly] improves our survival odds is, in and of itself, a sufficient explanation for its appearance.  You think I am kidding. I am not.  They exhibit the same amount of inquisitiveness as a gang mother whose delinquent sons keep showing up with stolen goods.  We needed a Mercedes, and... there it is, in the driveway!  We got the goods; let's not ask hard questions.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.