THE NEGATIVE AFTERBELIEF

You know this phenomenon, this optical illusion, that occurs when you stare too long at something and fatigue your photoreceptors? When you close your eyes you get what is called "retinal inertia", where those burned out receptors don't stop responding even in the absence of light. What you see then, with your eyes shut, is a "negative afterimage" that is the inverse of the light intensity and colours you were just looking at with your eyes open. Yeah. Now imagine that but with beliefs.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger, whose work I tend to like and I find myself constantly recommending to people, just produced a video correcting the record. He was upset about some arguments a talking-head on MSNBC, Vicky Nguyen, and a US senator, Tim Kaine, were making about Christian Nationalism and the idea of natural rights.

In his post sharing the video, Shellenberger tells us “The idea that our rights are natural is Christian Nationalist misinformation, say the media and Democrats. But it's not. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. Behind the Left's dehumanization of conservatives is an ignorant denial of America's spiritual foundation.” In a previous post on the same theme he suggested these two and others on the left were “captured by a radical ideology that is fundamentally anti-Christian.”

Shellenberger tells us that, “while the marriage of Christianity and Western civilization might appear strange or convoluted, for Nguyen, or theocratic, to Kaine, it did not appear so to America’s founding fathers, nor does it appear so for anyone familiar with America’s history and its founding on the theory of natural rights,” he goes on, explaining natural rights, “i.e. rights we are given by God or Nature or the Creator.” Shellenberger then reminds us of the second sentence of the US Declaration of Independence: “We hold the truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” Here he is also forced to acknowledge the ancients, that America’s founding documents reflected not merely a set of Protestant moral assumptions but “the republican model of government inherited from Greece and Rome” along with “Aristotelian reasoning about virtue and the common good…”

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