Originally Posted by Nick4444

So, dollar values attach?

This highlights the actual indifference to human life inhering in this new piety

Gone is the moral outrage that a life may have been extinguished, met with indifference, and measured against a calculus that includes cash value (something that exists only in the minds of men)

So we are back to where does this humanistic piety arise?

Check the term "progressive"

Beginning the the spread of evolutionary theory in the 19th Century, the notion arose that humankind is steadily moving to a more advanced state, an advanced state that included a more advanced moral situation -- all falling within the pattern was the emancipation of the slaves, the liberation of women, et al

And now, the recognition that the death penalty is wrong ... one merely has to couch it in those terms to get acceptance of the notion

In fact, it means just the contrary ... it means that human life is devalued (for a different example of a different dead end reached by that line of thinking read: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

(But it is extremely liberating

Not requiring moral responsibility from others, we are free not to require it of ourselves ... and more liberty is found

Man can become truly great and noble, in his own mind, when he strays from the confines imposed by the notions of right and wrong, and the effect is again to raise man to the positions formerly held by the gods of our superstitions)