The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all
."Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
"Britons never will be slaves."
Rule Britannia! 1740
I have often argued that the two greatest social developments in the history of mankind for the cause of good are
- Christianity
- British Common Law
The first Christianity establishes the idea that all people are equal in the sight of God:
Men, women, slaves, freemen, Jews, Greeks, rich, poor (to use the phrases of scripture) all are God children and thus due the respect of such.
Even if you don’t believe in Christ, that idea was about as radical as you can get in the 1st century. And it is from that idea that the rights of man evolved.
The second British common law built on both the concepts of Christianity and the rights granted by Magna Carta. Again this was revolutionary.
From this grew the concept that if men were equal before God they should also be equal before the law. It was the idea that the law applied to the great as well as the common, the powerful as well as the powerless and that judgement would not come in a summary manner.
It was this idea spread by the Brits going around the world that made possible those in the world who would eventually leave the empire they would build, because they would be educated in this law and then insist that said ideas be applied where they were.
Now I don’t claim for a moment that these concepts were always applied by imperfect humans nor to I claim that there were not those who tried to use them for their own advantages. If you want perfection you’ll have to wait for heaven. Suffice to say that those who would use such things for advantage would have had no problem using other systems the same way, systems that didn’t provide legal or social restraint to their goals.
These things changed the world for the better.
That’s what makes Britain’s situation today really sad and completely predictable.
Once the British started rejecting Christianity, equality before God, it became easy to reject equality before the law. The seeds laid by Henry VIII finally bloomed at the 1930 Lambeth Conference and have now spread and taken solid root to the point where Englishmen don’t have confidence in their own culture and are now ironically being colonized by a people who DO have confidence in both their laws and religion which proclaim them superior.
Thus if all men are not equal in the eyes of God why would they be equal before the law so why should British police or members of the British government risk their single life and limb with no reward to follow to enforce the laws of those who might harm them if they do or protect the rights of those who can not?
And of course nobody can be allowed to speak aloud this shameful change, they must all be silent less their true state be known and the newly minted slaves become aware of their chains.
So much for “Britons never never never shall be slaves”
How foolish, how sad and how utterly predictable.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 