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A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War QUOTES

A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War QUOTES

1 " Although political megalomaniacs are the most conspicuous end products of this reasoning, they are not necessarily the most characteristic. Atheistic nihilism transforms the “bourgeois” and highly moral individualism of the American Revolution into something entirely different. That older individualism was based on the idea of unalienable rights endowed by man’s Creator. Such rights were not unconditional. They were to be exercised only in accordance with the laws of nature and of nature’s God, which were moral laws. Rights and duties were in a reciprocal relationship. But the nature revealed by modern science—the unconditional basis of the belief in Progress—was that of mindless matter, a source of power to be commanded, not a source of morality to be obeyed. From here on, “rights” would be understood as the unconditional empowerment of the individual to do as he pleased. Self-realization became the code word for the new morality. The human self, however, was no longer understood to be made in the image of God, since God was dead. Self-realization was in fact only the correlate of the new atheism. As there could no longer be any distinction between man and God, which distinction is as fundamental to the Declaration of Independence as to the Bible, there could be no distinction between base and noble desires. All desires were understood to be created equal, since all desires were seen as originating in that highest of all authorities, the self-creating self. Each human being was to be his own God, obeying only those restrictions that were enforced upon him by the fact that he was not yet himself the universal tyrant. In time, however, Science would enable everyone to act as if he were the universal tyrant. "

― Harry V. Jaffa , A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War