........does western society, with it’s capatalist systems, have any thing to do with equality? Oh sure we spew out the equal rights stuff to atagonize or offer solice to a few but in reality we cannot have the way-of-life we do without in-equality. Our economy and legal system depend on it as do many of the religious institutions that directly and indirectly form our style of justice and government. There will always be those who are more equal than others so long as we insist on having the form of economic system that prevails today.

Equality, or at least the utopian version of it that we sometimes envision, is an illusion.

But in the Senate, smaller states are more equal then the larger states! In the professions, no. Would you want just anybody performing your brain surgery?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” And why is it self-evident? For the founding fathers, it was self-evident because God created all men equal. Because he created them equal, they all had equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life is obvious – it means that no one can legally kill you. Liberty means that no one can own you, or lay undue claim upon you. The pursuit of happiness arises from the Hedonistic ideal that the pursuit of happiness is the purpose of life. These founding Christians, being Utilitarians largely, of course agreed with the Hedonistic idea of the greater good – or maximizing happiness. You have the right to the pursuit of happiness because, they argued, it is the purpose of life, and God made you free to pursue that purpose.

But, you may say, we know that these ideas are merely American ideas. Christianity, you might extrapolate, is a dated culture, dead by the hand of Darwinist thought, evolutionism, survival of the fittest, and good sense. Furthermore, there is no need to cling to an old religion to retain these ideas. They are modern ideas that all people except as the civil human ideal.

But without God, nothing stands in the way of a total revokation of our freedom, our rights, and our equality in the eyes of the law and the legislature. If it should be convenient, if it should be lucrative, if it should be expedient, if it should be sufficiently satisfactory to whatever human powers-that-be, then out go our rights; defenestrated from a volatile card-tower of a society.

Who is to say that, without a real God, any one of us cannot be made to disappear without explanation, and without apology, on account of a neighbor’s suspicion of possible “terrorist activities?” Who would have the authority to deny the government’s right to do that? Without God, there is no greater authority than the governing body of a state. Without God, governments can freely redefine the purpose of life to suit the needs of their oligarchy, or plutocracy.

It would be logically unsound to argue that, because we need God to have these rights, God exists. The need for something does not neccesitate its existence, despite whatever tendencies of natural order may occur (i.e. food exists because we have hunger). No such relationship can be proven to Ultimately be, without a contradicting case. Truly, it is a reversal of cause and effect (we have hunger because food exists to base a need on).

Unfortunately, the existence of God, while undisprovable, is also unprovable. But I certainly hope that He does exist. Despite my imperfect nature, I value my rights too greatly to lose them to the “death of God.”

One thing I can say is that I find the whole Equal Opportunities thing to be far from equal. Filling in job application forms pisses me off something rotten, because they always ask for religious background and ethnic origin. They claim that it doesn’t affect your likelihood of getting the job, but it does. It SO does. For example, if a company has 49 Catholic employees and 50 Protestant employees, the next person to be hired is gonna be a Catholic – so that everything is equal in the laws eyes. I think that Equal Opportunities monitoring form should be completely abolished because it does not do what it claims it’s supposed to do.

I reckon that we shouldn’t all be equal… we should be proportional. Because we are far from equal. We are all different, unique, in every sense of the word.

I belive your words contain truth in them. Everyone in their individuality is not equal becase everyone is different. I also think that society in general trys to portray itself as equal but doesn’t do a very good job. For example, they don’t let really weak ppl on NBA basket ball teams, and they don’t let people of a unqualified nature be doctors. And to tell you the truth we aren’t made for equality, nature made it so the strongest surrvives, wether it be from brains or brute strength.