Equality is a terrible source for the foundation of human value. The reason this is the case is because equality is a unit or sum of measurement. It is about quantity, not quality, as Aristotle said long ago.
Almost anyone can grasp how it applies to measurement. For example, 2 + 2 is equal to 4. 5 × 5 is the same as 25. The same is the equivalent of equal. Almost anyone can do simple equations that demonstrate equality and how it works. Because this is the case many people will take that unit of measurement and work out pretty quickly that people are not the same, because no two people are equal.
Just watch the women’s Olympics boxing at the moment if you disagree. If you are still floating in the false ideology of equality, you at least have to be seeing the cracks in it, right?
This is a terrible foundation for establishing human value. Value must be based on something much more foundational, much more solid, much less up for question, and something much more philosophically sound. Luckily we have an answer: the image of God, or Imago Dei.
The doctrine of Imago Dei points to our incredible value for each and every individual human being. Humans, of any capacity or ability, are inherently of worth because of that image. It’s a baseline. You can see this image on the face of every human being. Because this is the case Constantine the Great long ago banned the branding of human slaves on the face, lest the image of God be marred.
This is something intrinsic to the scriptures; it is not that we are all children of God, not that we are all equal, and these are misnomers, but that we are all made in his image and reflect it to varying degrees. A doctrine of human value must be based on this apart from the idea of equality, this is incredibly important.
I don’t think that our egalitarian age is so excessively violent by accident. I know people will scoff at the idea of our age being excessively violent, but just because the mass market of infant slaughter is done in sterile rooms by people in hygienic and professional medical clothes and masks, using medical science to commit the violence, does not diminish the brutal reality of that violence.
Abortion tears a child apart limb by limb, and this is done on a mass industrial scale all across the world. You can’t get more brutal or excessively violent than that. When you add in how the modern world powers commit war crime after war crime on a mass scale in wars across the globe the death toll increases even more.
Ours is a bloodthirsty age shrouded in “implausible deniability.” At least past generations were honest about their brutality. Our modern society thinks it can hide from its bloody record. But it cannot, especially not before God.
But here is how equality comes into it: any egalitarian can look at a mother and her 12-week-old infant baby in the womb and do the basic weights and measurements and see that the two are not equal. One is “more equal” than the other, and she has the power to go to a doctor who’ll happily sign a death warrant for that child.
Our law enshrines the fact that all are not equal, because egalitarians have made sure that they draw the line at allowing equality to interfere with their desire to assert their sexual liberty and power over life just after conception.
In real terms, the foundation of human value in equality does nothing to protect the absolute weakest members of the human race, because the equations clearly bear out the fact that equality is nonsense and cannot exist. So the “more equal” have stacked the deck in their favour.
Equality is a useless metric for guard-railing society from such barbarity – and it is barbarity – because it is clearly false. You need a more basic fundamental value, a sacred one. Both the mother and the baby have the stamp of the image of God on them, and one should not dare to mar the image of God on the innocent.
A society that radically re-evaluates how it measures human value and bases that foundation on a solid philosophical and theologically defensible position will have a much better chance of stamping out the slaughter of innocents than one that bases human value in a clear lie.
People are not equal and that is precisely why the strong are called to protect the weak.
