Everyday People

Tell me friends, if you know,

If you smile at me, I will understand
'Cause that is something everybody everywhere does
In the same language

I can see by your coat, my friend
You're from the other side
There's just one thing I got to know
Can you tell me please, who won?

For Agamben a political life is aimed at the one thing that makes us human – the fact that happiness is always at stake in our living – essential to our form-of-life as humans. For Agamben life can never be separated from its form-of-life but this is precisely what political power attempts to do today as what Agamben terms “pseudo-scientific” ideology has invented the term “biological life” as the secularized term for “naked life.” Naked life, for Agamben is now the dominant form of life everywhere because political power has succeeded in founding itself on a separation of naked life from “form-of-life”.

I think of Agamben when Baudrillard speaks of his own “virtual state of rupture” with the political world and it is precisely this break, the lack of system commitments,  that make both he and Agamben such acute commentators on the (trans)political today. Baudrillard has long identified the state with the management of “the epidemic of consensus” from which terrorism, ridiculous and destined to failure as it is, protects us. Indeed, the state and terrorism both serve the system well. The state has held us nuclear hostages since the end of World War II,11 and now the entire planet is reduced to a battleground for the war against terrorism. Today terrorism and the state have become “accomplices in a circular set-up where terrorism makes no more sense than the state does.”

Katherine Watt writes: Aug. 20, 2020 - No Christianity, no human rights, by John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera

Most Americans take the existence of human rights for granted. We see them, to borrow a phrase, as “self-evident.” We can’t really imagine a world without them, or we look at places like China or North Korea with incredulity, as if it’s obvious that their way is clearly wrong. Instead, what these countries demonstrate is that there’s nothing “natural” about the idea of human rights. Rather they are the products of Judaeo-Christian beliefs about the intrinsic dignity of the human person.

Most countries don’t deny the idea of human rights outright. However, because they lack adequate moral grounding for them, human rights become a kind of buffet. Those in power pick the ones they like, for the groups they like, and ignore the rest. Again, to quote the report, “human rights are now misunderstood by many, manipulated by some, rejected by the world’s worst violators, and subject to ominous new threats.

The only secure basis for human rights, of course, is the Christian belief that humans are created in the image of God. Think about that line from our founding documents: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But it’s not self-evident that we are equal, if we only consider the external attributes humans have. We don’t all share those attributes. We don’t all share the same height, or weight, or IQ, or hair color, or skin tone. Thus equality must be based on some universal human quality that is intrinsic to our humanity. Christianity offers this in the idea of the image of God.

Without the Christian idea of the imago Dei, “universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated” human rights simply wouldn’t exist..

Our first freedom, like the rights that depend on it, are grounded in a Christian view of what it means to be human. They cannot be sustained otherwise…1,000 citations on vax damage   https://www.saveusnow.org.uk/covid-vaccine-scientific-proof-lethal/

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