Amnesty International, whose stated mission is “to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights and demand justice for those whose rights have been violated” has said they have three goals for 2020.
First, they want to make same-sex relations legal in all countries. Second, they want to make abortion legal in all countries. And third, they want to abolish the death penalty in all countries.
In other words, they want to impose their morality on the world.
Given the fact that Amnesty International has rejected a Christian view of morality, their ideas of “right” and “wrong” are entirely arbitrary. Concepts like “justice” have no fixed basis outside of the human mind and imagination.
In a sense, they’ve reduced morality to a mere social construct. Either “justice” is something we all collectively agree on or it’s something those with power determine and impose on the rest of us.
But one wonders how those who pride themselves on being champions for oppressed minority groups can go about imposing on those minorities the views and standards of the powerful majority.
Now, such a relativistic and arbitrary view of justice is a problem for Amnesty International as it eliminates any meaningful grounds for preferring or imposing one set of moral ideals to another.
The question is, why should Amnesty International undermine the moral standards of other cultures and other countries? Why must those countries conform to what Amnesty International deems good or right or just?
Suppose the roles were reversed and those other countries set out to make same-sex relations illegal across the world. What grounds would Amnesty International have for opposing their efforts?
Ultimately, by seeking to impose their morality on other cultures and countries without appealing to any moral standard above themselves, Amnesty International is essentially attempting to play God. They want the world to conform to “right” and “wrong”, not as the Bible defines it, and evidently, not as culture and country define it either, but as they define it – which seems rather tyrannical for an organization that claims to focus on “human rights”.
In the end, when you do away with the Bible you do away with any meaningful moral standard by which you measure the moral actions of other people, other cultures, and other nations. In essence, it is to embrace absurdity, as their last two points further demonstrate.
In their second and third stated goals for 2020, Amnesty International say they want to make abortion legal in all countries, while at the same time, abolishing the death penalty in all countries. Just think about that for a moment.
This “human rights” organisation wants to make it illegal to sentence a killer to death for the crime of cold-blooded murder, while simultaneously demanding the freedom to sentence an innocent baby to death for the “crime” of being unloved.
Concepts like “human rights” presuppose a real moral standard outside of and above ourselves. They are an appeal to how things ought to be and how people ought to be treated by virtue of their humanity. We cannot do away with God or absolute morality without forfeiting any meaningful grounds to discuss moral issues.
If we do away with God, if we do away with a real, transcendent moral standard, then all that must exist is time and chance acting on matter. Douglas Wilson explains the implications of that:
“If this is true, then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true, but rather, because of a series of chemical reations.”
Wilson continues, “Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They all all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before.
“If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ to the chemical fizz we call reasoning, or ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to the irrational reaction we call ‘morality’.
“If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else.”
Without God and an absolute moral standard to appeal to, there can be no human rights, no morality, no justice, no right and wrong, and no truth. All we’re left with is one group attempting to impose their arbitrary ideas on another, until ironically, at the end of the day, the oppressed minorities are entirely consumed by the oppressive majority.
