Term Paper on "Works of John Locke"

>

Locke had seen what happened to society when the powers of the church and of the government were combined: "...churches frequently used the force of the state to promote and enforce their interests and doctrines," Jayne explains. This combination of church and state "caused horrendous atrocities against Jews and heretics, as well as the European religious wars between Catholics and Protestants" in the 16th and 17th Centuries, which resulted in millions of deaths. In his writings - which later influenced Jefferson and Madison to add "the right of religious freedom" into the Bill of Rights to the Constitution - Locke agreed that force was sometimes necessary when the state needed to punish a person for violating "any other man's rights." But Locke also said the following in his Letter Concerning Toleration:

It is not my business to inquire here into the original of the power or dignity of the clergy. This only I say, that, whencesoever their authority be sprung, since it is ecclesiastical, it ought to be confined within the bounds of the Church, nor can it in any manner be extended to civil affairs, because the Church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth."

As to Locke's doctrine of human rights, an article in Catholic Insight explains that Lock was the "philosophical godfather of the doctrine of human rights" (Roney, 2004) and that Locke insisted that the "inequality" of humans is not a divine creation, but quite a human one. Roney came to that conclusion after reading an excerpt from Chapter II (verse 4) of Locke's an Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government: "...there [is] nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank," Locke wrote in the essay (4LawSchoolLawLibrary, 2004), "promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty."

Locke's writings did not always carry the weight that they do today; indeed, even today, in England, Locke's native land, "...there is no public… READ MORE