(May 26, 2015 at 3:49 pm)Jenny A Wrote:(May 26, 2015 at 12:49 pm)Heywood Wrote: For an theist egalitarianism is an easy concept to accept. People should be treated the same because God created them as equals. However if there is no God then there really isn't any rational reason to actually believe that all the different races, genders, or sexual orientations are actually equivalent. There might be rational reasons to pretend the are equivalent....social harmony and such...but is there rational reason to believe they are actually equivalent? It is simply too much of a stretch to think that nature, as a matter of happenstance, made all these things equivalent.
Oh my, let's start with some basic definitions shall we?
Egalitarianism is not based on the assumption that all people are created with strength, height, intelligence, longevity, attractiveness, fertility, speed, endurance, will power, creativity, or any other trait you can name. Whether created by god (no proven) or nature people are not equal in any of those traits. Even twins are no exactly the same in such traits. I've never met anyone who seriously thought people are equal in such a way.
Egalitarianism is a reaction to the notion that some people should have more rights and higher status because who their parents were or some other arbitrary trait such as skin color, sex, sexual preference. In practice this leads to statements like "all men are equal before the law." It is not a godly notion. The divine right of kings, is a religious notion. Many, many religions have declared that the king was the god because god said so. The Judeo Christian god makes many distinctions on the basis of such arbitrary traits. As early as Genesis he chose one nation over all others. He chose men over women, and the first born of the first wife over all other sons. Following Jesus, the Christian god embraced all nations but still left out women, slaves, and others in the equal rights stakes.
Egalitarianism is a secular, not an atheist movement. It began as a political movement whose rallying cry was that all people should be treated equally under the same circumstances, i.e. under the law. It's in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." But the idea was not original to the founding fathers. That idea has been expanded to hiring practices as well. It's basic fairness, and there's no pretense about it. People who behave the same should be treated the same. Ability and industry should be rewarded the same regardless of gender or skin color.
Egalitarianism did not mean that everyone will end up equal is status, wealth, or happiness, or that everyone should have an equal right under the law to attain status and wealth based upon what they actually do or don't do. However, some socialists and/or communists would take the idea one step further and suggest that all economic outcomes should be the same regardless of ability. I wouldn't go so far as that.
In any case, egalitarianism is simply an outgrowth of the basic concept of fairness.
The Declaration of Independence suggests that egalitarianism is more than a political movement.....that it is a brute fact of nature established by God and not some choice made by society.
