I can't get enough of Glen's take on things. What a blessing Glen is to the body of Christ.

@thefioretta100

2 ай бұрын

Agree

@SpeakLifeMedia

2 ай бұрын

@@thefioretta100 @marthakladitis1661 Thanks guys!

@danielmcdonagh2889

2 ай бұрын

I find it rather annoying I don't have him at hand. At church, or on Whattsap!. Such wisdom is sorely needed nowadays. God bless you Glen!

Wow! I’ve believed for a long time that morals, like the facts of the universe around us, are not _invented,_ they are _discovered._ But I had no idea that human rights are also not invented, but discovered. And what a great job grounding all this in the Incarnation! Well done, sir!😁👍

@SpeakLifeMedia

Ай бұрын

You're welcome. God bless!

Oh me oh my! Very well done putting all of that together! I’ll be using this when I speak with family and friends about Christianity. Thank you!

Great piece of analysis! And a really insightful unpacking of Sam Harris' cup of water analogy and its implications for our valuing of humanity.

@SpeakLifeMedia

2 ай бұрын

Thanks!

Speak life is a good channel

This whole discussion on human rights reminds me of a Terry Pratchett quote (from Hogfather). He was an Atheist/Agnostic so I don't completely agree with this quote, but I think it is a good encapsulation of the dilemma faced without a grounding in Christianity. The quote is discussing the necessity of myth (in context of "The Hogfather", i.e. Santa Claus) as a requisite for human dignity. "All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point-" MY POINT EXACTLY. ― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

@kennorthunder2428

2 ай бұрын

Until it gets personal. He's fooled into thinking that he's above it all.

@SpeakLifeMedia

2 ай бұрын

Sensational quote. Pratchett was so, so interesting.

@micahandeleanordeegan5071

2 ай бұрын

​@@SpeakLifeMediacouldn't agree more. Every time I read Pratchett, I come away with another nugget that seems to speak so much better than he could have ever realised. Case in point from an audiobook this evening in a conversation between an honest policeman and the villain he caught attempting to murder his son (ring any bells?): "What stands between you and sudden death right now is the law you don't acknowledge.". 🤯

@sellicott

2 ай бұрын

@@micahandeleanordeegan5071 Which of the "Guards" is that quote from? I know I read it a while ago, but I read all of them in quick succession, so sometimes the plots/quotes get muddled.

@miastupid7911

2 ай бұрын

@@micahandeleanordeegan5071 yes, except Saint Nicholaos (AKA SANTA CLAUS) was very real. He was one of the authors of the Nicene Creed. And he upheld human rights to the fullest, giving away all his worldly possessions that he inherited from his family to protect the innocent. Three of them being daughters of another man in the region where the Saint lived that were to be sold off because they were too poor to marry. Hence he through sacks of gold through the window for their dowries to save them. That's where you get the presents in the stocking at Christmas from. Reading the life of the Saints of the Church also gives you nuggets about the absolute reality of it ALL.

Thank you for you ministry ❤❤❤❤❤

Fantastic . Thank you

Only Christianity provides the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of the human experience.

Without rights there is no crime,nor right or wrong.

Glen is a prophet like Isiah, Jeremiah

If the concept and practice of human rights were truly biblical in origin, they should have been enshrined into law in the fourth century. The fact that we did not experience such events until the eigthteenth century proves that human rights came about due to the European Enlightenment, not Christianity.

Austin Farrer, who taught at Oxford and was a close friend of CS Lewis, wrote in _Faith and Speculation_ that we should start with ourselves. When we see our inadequacies, we can look to Christ. From him, we can analogize up to God the Father and down to the entire created world. It's a form of Christian humanism.

@mahaliagayle2618

2 ай бұрын

I like what is said here about starting with the self. Even Christian brotherly love begins with loving yourself.

@mahaliagayle2618

2 ай бұрын

Also, people should have the option not to be English.

19:25 "Humans do not have the power to invent such things..." (as human rights). Well put Glenn. I like to use that argument to say that humans (as purely material beings) don't have the capability to invent atheism. A catch 22 if there ever was one.

Thank you, Glen. Always such great stuff, but I am sorry that to see things get all hyped and and 'colorful.' You don't need to do things like everybody else. It feels as if you must sell what you say, as it the value of it does not measure up, as if it needs help. But it is not so. Would you reconsider?

@SpeakLifeMedia

2 ай бұрын

Do you mean the opening 30 seconds that preview the coming video? Or something else?

@amynatzke1050

2 ай бұрын

Not the 30 second opening in itself-- but definitely the very short clip, "oh NOOOO"--- that sort of thing. It feels like the delivery has been very substantially dumbed-down. I would add the that effect of the colorful items in the studio also seems very contrived. Generally, also, the pacing is faster, a little hyped up. To me, it does not correspond with your level of insight and commitment, or the dignity of the content you present. @@SpeakLifeMedia

@SpeakLifeMedia

2 ай бұрын

I hear you and have been thinking about this a lot. Here's where I come to... I don't think the content has changed (ie the kinds of analysis and comment given). And if the content really is the most important thing, then different people will react differently to the packaging. Our current approach is getting many more people engaging with the content (well over quadruple on average) so if delivering the content to people really is the most important thing, the packaging is doing a good job for us. My instinct is to simply record monologues on my phone and hit upload. But making our KZread videos look like KZread videos is proving to be important in reaching the platform. Always happy to hear ways we can improve though...

What about classical>>Renaissance thought à la Pica de la Mirándola, Oration on the Dignity of Man? With emphasis on human capacity, improvement and perfectability, the question is not the equality or dignity of default humans but on humanity as a quest. I cannot understand your emphasis on economic value as the alternative to Christian-created value. Is there not another realm?

@SpeakLifeMedia

2 ай бұрын

That kind of Renaissance Humanism owed so much to biblical thought (which Pica acknowledged). I think it's important that humans are valued *as such* and not as based on capacities, lest those with diminished capacities be considered as having diminished value. I don't only reference economic value, I also talk about happiness (hedonic value, you might say). If someone believes that human value should not be indexed to either of those kinds of value or to capacities or achievements, then they're upholding a particularly Christian ideal - one that derives from the incarnation of the God-man in which human value is granted in the gift of God rather than the achievement of humanity.

Yuval Harari only takes his metaphor half way! After he has dissected a living being to its smallest components and not found human rights, ask him to rebuild the living being from those parts. When he finds that he cannot reanimate his pile of parts, he will have found the source of all natural rights: the spark of life - the breath of God - the Nephesh. This was "Self-Evident" to John Locke and if you think about it, it will be Self-evident to you!

It didn't come to mind until it was created and put into words. Human Rights was for 1 not all because one defined what is considered human rights. But for me it was always about accessing money but for Christians somehow it's about God. So the question now is whether it's Believe or not Believe if it can only be about money. Yey, it's the only logical non religious answer and human answer. You see, if people are working on an object and subject that doesn't offend any race or skin color or shape or form we all focus on non offensive stuff.

Yeah so now you have to take into consideration it is one person, a family, a community or the whole state and country? How to define equality? Is there value that each human is worth.? 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, minimum/month? Okay if we take this value and assume that there are 8 billion. How much is that you assuming we need for one year's budget? But then, everyone is worth the same no matter what? Or do you want to stratify according to love and likes or types of jobs?

What Sam fails to understand is any other worldview but his own, and he doesn't even believe his worldview's ultimate conclusions. Jordan is right, Sam acts as if God exists.

Great stuff Glen. A little push back. At a couple of points you said that "rights" must be given from beyond humanity. I wonder if you are just arguing that for specifically "human rights"? Because it's pretty obvious that rights can be invented by society or governments or others. The right to vote for example is not nonsensical, but it is bestowed by the law of the land, rather than God. Even think of a boardgame. You have the right to collect money if someone lands on your property in Monopoly. The rulebook says so. And by playing the game, we decide to abide by those rules. But the rules are just man made. I think that some rights in society are like that. As a Christian, I don't think "human rights" are like that. Although... Could an atheist effectively argue that they are? Could they argue that human rights are like the rules in a boardgame we have invented? Sure it would make them arbitrary and able to be wiped out by the powerful, but would that make them nonsensical?

@SpeakLifeMedia

2 ай бұрын

Yes, that's helpful. And especially necessary when we see the invention of all kinds of 'rights' that people in previous eras would consider privileges at best. I was thinking of those "inalienable" and pre-social / pre-governmental 'rights' the Declaration of Independence begins with. Perhaps it's best to say human /value/ must be recognised as coming from beyond humanity. On the 'rules of a boardgame' analogy... yes, you /could/ consider human value like that, but you've then described it as convention - good manners for your society but not binding on humans/governments in other places. But that's pretty much Jeremy Bentham's position on 'natural rights'. For him governments are the source of laws and claiming that we have 'rights' deriving from 'nature' or 'God' was nonsense on stilts. For him, all we have are human societies/governments/legal systems - IOW there are different boardgames but no international court of justice in the Hague to arbitrate between Chess and Monopoly players. Nothing stands above the laws of the land. It seems to me you can take the Bentham position or you can believe in rights. It's disingenuous to use the language of rights when you basically only recognise 'the laws of the land'.

Value according to how you want to value your well-being and what makes you sufficiently happy over the rest of your life. You only value inheritance if u have something of value to pass down. Elton John doesn't exist? Now I am pissed at how long they left me behind. Exactly. Walt Disney did say that you wish and it comes true. Just like everyone seems to assume god will grant wishes. But again, that would require money. Someone kept re-creating it over and over again that caused this idolatry towards huma and was given a face that was imprinted in their mind on how this person would look like.

I'm not too sure whether your argument holds water, but also, what rights are you talking about, does a murderer have the same rights yet do you not remove his rights, so you're saying all good people have human rights, yet no one is righteous not even one, and being a Christian are we not all deserving death, I think human rights is actually a worldly concept, and not actually a godly one, which relies on God's Mercy upon us that we should have any rights at all.

So you think YNH is wrong, that if you were cut open (in a way that could reveal such things) human rights would indeed be there right alongside the liver and the kidneys. Which is frustrating when you consider the effort YNH put into explaining how we rely on stories, that we make up, to get through life and succeed. He didn't pick out human rights as a seperate thing, it was merely another example, but to you it is a seperate and different thing. But then, you probably think that about all the obvious made up things in your own religion, too, Noah and the flood; Jonah swallowed by a whale; the Garden of Eden and the talking snake. And very quickly you christians become complete aliens to atheists. How can you believe these things, they were never meant to be anything more than stories? Personally, I never went "oh, no," at YNH, I thought 'what a great insight'. Where did human rights come from? We fought for them. Before, and long after, Christ, common people have been pushing back the power of the elite. If we forget to value them, we could lose them, and God would sit idly on His hands, just as He always did, while we fight and die to recover what we lost. But we would tell ourselves that He cares deeply and is helping us, because that's what we do

@jarlwilliam9932

2 ай бұрын

Don’t know what history books you’ve been reading but common people fighting the elites has always been exceedingly rare throughout all of history. Rome faced one major slave rebellion and the slaves didn’t even want freedom, they just wanted to kill as many Romans as possible. No, the very idea of human rights and the idea of the brotherhood of man comes from Christianity and the teachings of Christ. The world before Christ was vastly different, with slaves having no value whatsoever, and absolutely no legal rights. That changed with the teachings of Christ and the teachings of the Bible.

@maddi62

2 ай бұрын

@jarlwilliam9932 It's been a long, slow process. Democracy has spread further and further over a long, long time. It didn't suddenly spring into being with Christ. There were key moments where it jumped - magna Carta, for instance, over a thousand years after Christ; women's suffrage. It has gone backwards sometimes; the Greeks had democracy. What, the prevalence of slaves is THE measure of freedom? It's one of many. Jesus said the right things, but he wasn't alone. The humility he preached, sadly lacking in today's churches, was strong in Eastern teachings, too. Some before Christ Besides, what's this about Rome facing only one slave rebellion. They were constantly putting down rebellion, and facing people that didn't want them, who eventually over-ran them and took their empire.

@jarlwilliam9932

2 ай бұрын

@@maddi62 I didn’t say it happened overnight, not at all. What I said was that catalyst for that long slow change was the teachings of Christ. I said one major rebellion, as in slaves revolted, not client states in a far off province that also had slaves, but the slaves themselves revolted, and when those slaves revolted they wanted to conquer Rome rather than leave and gain freedom. No eastern philosophy espoused what Jesus taught, at the very least not as a whole, perhaps in bits and pieces here and there, but the Bible is where all those philosophies came to a head, Christ is where all of those philosophies found purchase in the minds and hearts across continents. The very simple idea that all humans have intrinsic value was never taught before Christ, and most certainly not to the degree with which he espoused. We occasionally got ideas like the philosophy of global citizenship from groups like the Stoics, who still held sway to the old superstitions of the common people, such as a man Sam Harris claimed to be more moral than God, Marcus Aurelius allowed his wife to sleep with a slave only to murder that man and make his wife bathe in his blood because Marcus Aurelius beloved that a gladiator’s blood was a powerful aphrodisiac, he then slept with his wife while she was covered in that man’s blood. Something the Bible commands a man not to do. Even reading all of the philosophies coming out of both the east and west, it’s clear that the modern notion of morality comes from the Christian Bible, Tom Holland has several books on it if you wish to read them.

@maddi62

2 ай бұрын

@jarlwilliam9932 I've heard TH talk about this, not yet read his book. I will today. I confess, at the moment, I'm arguing from very partial knowledge of other sources of virtue teachings, but my intuition tells me that it is intrinsic to humans to want to live in peace, and that the way to do so is by bestowing value on others, thereby encouraging reciprocation. It's not that people have such a right, as they have a heart and a liver, but what is good for me is what's good for them. I may have been misled over the years, but my feeling is that this is a constant throughout humanity. Jesus articulated it well, but is not the sole source, nor the originator. I'm going to have to do some research. Meanwhile, thanks for your good-natured exchange. I didn't know that about Marcus Aurelius. He had some wisdom, but zi guess even the best of the Roman emperors were somewhat bonkers

@treespirit2000

2 ай бұрын

SEPARATE.

I never see this argument for inalienable rights, and I find it so powerful and irrefutable.

The maker of this video fails to make the distinction both Harari and Harris make between mind-independent reality and mind-dependent reality. Both men agree that God, rights, etc. exist as concepts ("stories" to use Harari's word, aka 'social constructs'). IOWs, their existence depends on human minds. This can be demonstrated empirically. They reject the idea that God, rights, etc. exist in any material, mind-independent way because that existence cannot in any way be demonstrated empirically. This guy is seriously confused about the nature of reality and the arguments he pretends to critique.

I wonder whether a man like Sam values opinions

Serial killers have no intrinsic value.

Which bible are you reading? Life is cheeeeeeap to god

How is any morality any better than another in an amoral universe? To say we are only animals, whether advanced or not, is to say we are amoral, so that our morality has no real meaning. There is no good in good, and no evil in evil. Good luck trying to really live this way, atheist, for how could any real good come from your life this way? Create your own meaning? Stop making stuff up

I won't dwell on Mr Scrivener's misunderstanding of science, because that's not the big flaw in his argument. The flaw is that he is an affirmation of the consequent fallacy to make an unfounded point. He is defining the phrase "human rights" to be a Christian thing and then trying to prove that human rights are a Christian thing. He tries to burry this falacy among a number of ways of valuing human existence which are largely irrelevant and not comprehensive. I (and many, many others like me) value all human life because we feel a genuine connection to all humanity and see potential in the lives of others and how they can further the joy of human existence. All he has convinced me of is that perhaps "human rights" is a phrase that has lost its saltiness.

@pweinbrenner

2 ай бұрын

Hmmm. But don’t humans have intrinsic rights even if don’t feel a connection with other humans (I have more connection with my dog than people in nations a half a globe away), even if I see no potential in him or her ( first or final hours of human life, etc.), and even if they can’t further the joy of human existence (which half of USA would say of Trump, ha ha). Thomas Jefferson stated that he did not want to write anything new in the Declaration, but only what we already by consensus believed. One phase he used was “sacred and undeniable.” Since the Founders of the USA were both religious people and people of the Enlightenment, I can understand why Franklin changed the wording. Maybe if not given by God, but by man, all rights are extrinsic and not intrinsic. If not my comments, please like me.

Amazing the arrogance of religious thinking that other species of animal are considered a lower order. Dolphins are highly intelligent creatures who live mostly in harmony. Don't think Dolphins need church.

this guy is really bad

@danielmcdonagh2889

2 ай бұрын

He is really bad at giving a bad argument. Agreed!

Touched by a Cosmic Elton John........ Lets go AI Prompt Hacks...bring out this image....