A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

this is scarily postmodern.

Surely universal human rights are superior to rights that only pertain to a specific ethnicity and that superiority can be maintained even while allowing the perception and implementation to be critiqued on the grounds of relativism.  I think much of the problem is that people look for given rather than being willing to accept responsibility for created values.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

maybe if you boil christianity down to its essence, sans effluvia, it comes down to a bouillon of two basic ingredients:

1. if you're too nice to people, and stand up for the rights of the individual when they're in conflict with those rights appropriated by the power of the state, the state will kill you.

2. unselfishness taken to the point of total self-sacrifice is so rare that the narrative created by such acts (real or imaginary), sends a wave of novelty across the waters of history that can last millennia, and inspire people, when they are in the darkest hours of their lives, to acknowledge that not all men are brutes, and their intentions not always venal.

whether it cannot be superceded... i suspect so, it's the how that is the puzzle.

but were that impulse unsuccessful, at least the old tried and true one was noble, if overchallenging for most, (therefore alienating). buddha's road is better tailored to the average human's scale and range of attainability.

the theory is fine, it's the execution that's the problem... the numbers need onside to make ahimsa effective are a quantum magnitude greater that what is muster-able now.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty