Religious rights and human rights: The meaning of freedom

[cbayer]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2014/03/religious-rights-and-human-rights

Mar 22nd 2014, 11:23 by B.C.

CAN religious believers and secularists find a consensus on what sort of human entitlements are fundamentally important and in need of protection? Given that in virtually all countries that aspire to be liberal, rights-based democracies, there are people of many religious beliefs and none, that is a pretty important question. And despite the best efforts of Voltaire and other enlightened libertarians, it is still unresolved.

Theos, a religion-minded British think-tank that says it tries to foster intelligent debate about faith and public life, has just waded into these deep waters with an extended essay by its research director, Nick Spencer, on "How to Think about Religious Freedom". Although the study is written from an emphatically Christian perspective, its tone varies; it is emollient (in the sense of seeking common ground with secularism) in some places and uncompromising in others.

Mr Spencer argues that in Western thought, the very ideal of human rights is rooted in the Christian idea of a man as a creature made in the image of God, whose highest calling is to be reconciled with God. Secularists would probably retort (and Mr Spencer more or less acknowledges the force of this point) that human rights began as a protest against cruel theocracies which enforced a particular way of religious thinking and punished dissenters, either physically or by excluding them from power.

Anyway all that is behind us, the essay insists. It goes on to reject blasphemy laws as a way of sheltering faiths and their adherents from being offended; but it insists that the mildish forms of state privilege enjoyed by national churches in some Western countries, such as England and Denmark, need not compromise democracy or civil liberty. So where does the hard argument begin? Some would assert the need for both individual rights and "group rights"—the ability of freely constituted institutions, including churches and other faith communities, to live by their own rules and encourage others to do so. And religious people would put much more emphasis on group rights than some secularists would.

more at link

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Rights did not originate in Christian

theology, that is a load of crap.

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Shit, even *within* the context of white european western thought

they still ignored rights when they realized all that fucking cotton wasn't going to pick itself.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. In fairness, the reformation did raise the issue of religious freedom.

However that was 1200 years into Christianized European civilization. This was a religion that instructed slaves, in a Roman slave-based economy, to accept their role in that world, instructed serfs in a feudal society to do the same, and was hierarchical and authoritarian in its organizational structure while providing the ideological basis for monarchical societies.

[AtheistCrusader]

4. And it took the Catholics and the Protestants another.. 600 years to stop

killing each other over which edition of the bible would be taught in schools.

[Warren Stupidity]

5. well indeed "religious freedom" generally meant "ours, not yours"

until they exhausted themselves into a bloodletting stalemate, then they started considering "tolerance".