AMP: Environmentalism and Human Dignity

When reading an article of Dr. Mohler I often find myself agreeing on the issue but not on the reasoning. Just like in his latest blog on Plant Rights, Screaming Vegetation, and a "Biocentric" Worldview. This article of him is also quite good to explain my worldview on human dignity. It's close to the Christian one but not quite the same.

As a social-democrat human dignity is central to my worldview. It doesn't need to be received by the appreciation as the creation of some God. It's simply axiomatically there. Just like the axioms of Newtonian physics the axiom of of human dignity is set and perceived by experience. After 8000 years of recorded human history we have enough experience what happens if a society ignores the dignity of human beings or makes it somehow conditional on religious dogma.
If you condition human dignity on race (like the Nazis did) or condition it on worldview (like the communists did) you will very soon end up with concentration camps or Gulags.
But to heavily disagree with Dr. Mohler it is anything but safe to reason for human dignity on religious grounds. First of all: Human Dignity on itself is something that is alien to the Christian worldview. The Christian worldview, especially the one of conservative Christians, teachers that humans have no value on dignity on their own, but are on the contrary despicable, evil sinners. If there is an intrinsic dignity of the human being in the Christian worldview it just comes from an transaction of God's dignity onto the human being.
To point this difference, the difference between an intrinsic human dignity and a transacted human dignity, out is not nitpicking. Once you base human dignity on an act of transferal from a divine entity you open the possibility to argue whether this deity give human dignity to any human.
This is not just a theoretical consideration. The believe that Atheists by their rejection of God also rejected the dignity that God assigns to every human being allowed Christians and other religions to persecute Atheists for centuries.

This centrality of human dignity also comes to play when I consider the environment. In a truly humanist worldview you protect nature for the sake of human civilization. Any society benefits largely from living in an eco-system that's intact. To preserve this natural environment doesn't serve foremost nature but mankind.  It also means that human societies are allowed to cut down nature of to reduce it in certain areas if it serves a greater good and doesn't cause more harm than it does good. Unfortunately this sane position has been hijacked by some neo-pagans who in worship of mother nature want to protect nature for natures sake and make humans subservient to that worship.

Dr. Mohler is right that putting the nutrition of people at risk for the sake of some zany new-age religion is at it's base inhuman. To see him than argue on the other hand that it's wrong to protect nature for nature's sake but that you should instead protect nature for God's sake seems somewhat strange to me. But it reminds that Social-Democrats and Christians quite often agree on the issue but also disagree quite often on the reasoning.