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As has been said, my title is Human Rights versus Religion.

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And that might seem a bit curious because those of you who are familiar with human rights

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documents might realise that the right to freedom of religion is written in every one of them.

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And I talk later about just how important many people may think it is,

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but certainly that people have a right to freedom of religion is thought to be essential.

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I mean, it's the one thing you can do rights that like the right to life is the one

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thing you can be sure you'll find in any human rights document in this country.

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I think we're particularly concerned with the European Convention of Human Rights,

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and there there is a very clear, absolute right to freedom of religion and belief.

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Now, it's only a right to believe what you want when it comes to manifestation.

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And the second part of the clause, a lot in freedom of religion qualifies the rights to manifest it.

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Because, of course, obviously, if you want to manifest your religion, there are some ways that which might be not terribly conducive to morality.

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If your religion says that you should sacrifice people or eat people.

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Well, religions can say all kinds of funny things. Obviously, there are some things that religion says that a democratic society could not allow.

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So that is, I suppose, one reason why we find the right qualified.

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But I think I'd just to mention that division I get worried by that division because if you think about what is the right to freedom of belief,

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freedom of religious belief particularly mean if you can't manifest it, it doesn't mean very much if manifesting.

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It means even talking about it, saying what you believe then.

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Quite clearly a totalitarian regime which wants to suppress religion is quite happy if you believe what you want,

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as long as you never show it in your behaviour or your actions, your speech.

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So if everything is in manifestation, then that would suggest that actually the right,

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the absolute right to freedom of belief has become very attenuated.

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Now, this just comes back to a basic issue about human rights, that many people think that human rights are of an absolute nature.

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They trump other things. That's part of their point.

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But of course, once you start talking about rights, it doesn't require very much imagination to realise that they can begin to clash with each other.

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We can all think of examples. Particular example might be the right to express your religious belief,

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but that may clash with the right of other people not to be discriminated against.

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And it's actually particularly important to clash nowadays when you might get a clash between religious rights and the rights of homosexuals.

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So there is therefore a very great possibility of clash between rights.

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And the question is, what do you do about that? And one possibility is that it just in the end collapses into a calculation of consequences,

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and then the whole notion of rights just goes out of the window.

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Another possibility is that some rights that's more important than others.

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There is no hierarchy of rights. Many human rights people talk, say,

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because it may very well be you just quietly forget some rights have not been very important and emphasise others as being important.

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Now this all goes back to the basic issue how rights important for morality anyway,

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because utilitarians consequentialist generally might think that the notion of an absolute rights,

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regardless of consequences, is exceptionally dangerous. And we all know that Utilitarians traditionally thought the rights embody nonsense on stilts.

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So the question is anyway, are human rights terribly helpful when we talk about morality in ordinary life?

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Of course, nowadays it's very easy to assume that rights are the only thing that matter in morality.

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I have my rights, we're told time and time again it's not very clear what having the right means unless you know who's going to meet that right,

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who has a responsibility for meeting it. So that, again, is another problem about rights.

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But the notion of human rights, it is on everybody's lips.

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It's part of the currency, the rhetoric of politics.

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So it's I think it's important to see how it is actually work.

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Looking at how far it does elucidate and inform our moral views.

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Just before I came here this afternoon,

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I was reading an email from the Republic of Ireland where people were grumbling about the Irish Commission of Human Rights,

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which has just issued a very lengthy 100 page document concerning the position of church schools in the Republic of Ireland.

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Now, the point about church groups and of course their long established mainly Catholic,

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that the point about those schools is that they're there presumably to,

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if not exactly inculcate religious faith, at least to somehow express it in education.

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And those who think that human rights are important will say yes.

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But what about those who are not Catholic?

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What about those who do wish to be suffering indoctrination or proselytising words that are used in the document but not defined?

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What do we do about that?

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No one has a right to be excluded from an institution or to make to feel somehow second class because they don't uphold its values.

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So here you see human rights being always used as a weapon in practice against religion,

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that you have a traditional institutional set up of Catholic schools and then adoption of human rights being introduced.

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That suggests that actually imposing any kind of religious view and imposing is another word for just teaching is somehow to be ruled out.

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Now, this, I think, exemplifies a basic attitude in Europe nowadays, where the role of religion in the public sphere is very much contested.

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There are philosophical arguments being put forward for it that religion is of its nature, irrational faith and reason, a separate.

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It's seen as subjective beyond the scope of rational debate.

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Now there's a long philosophical argument about faith and reason.

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And, I mean, it's almost the most important issue in philosophy, religion.

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So I'm not going to get involved too much in that.

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But just to point out that there is this attitude very prevalent, more prevalent in non-free self-proclaimed and philosophical circles.

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But let me quote from a law case in the England and Wales High Court from the 24 February this year.

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Where they, in fact, quote a previous law case of last year where Lord Justice laws made what I thought were very tendentious statements.

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Now, the important thing here is that the thing is resonating through the courts that one judge makes pronouncements that seem highly controversial,

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then picked up by the judges, and they become, in effect, the law of the land.

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They say the conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position

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on the grounds that it's espoused only by the adherents of a particular faith is deeply unprincipled.

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It imposes compulsory law not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion.

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This must be so because in the eye of everyone, save the believer religious face is necessarily subjective.

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Being in communicable by any kind of proof or evidence the ascertainment of such a truth,

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if it is true, and that paradoxically they do accept it, might be.

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It lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society.

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I think that word reasonable perhaps echoes the work of John Rules.

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Therefore, it lies only in the heart of the believer whose alone bound by it no one else

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is or can be so bound to less by his own free choice to accept its claims.

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The promulgation of law further up, the protection of the position held on religious grounds cannot be justified.

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It is irrational. It prefers the subjective over the subjective.

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Its divisive, capricious and arbitrary.

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So we have words like subjective, irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary being referred to religion.

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I wish once thoughts by in the kind of waning days of logical positivism,

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I am sure you would approve very much of that kind of statement really in spirit anyway.

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And it's really assuming, as people like Richard Dawkins do nowadays, that proof or evidence is only scientific proof or evidence.

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Anything else is beyond the scope of reason. Faith is of its nature, subjective.

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What if you believe that, of course, religion can have no place in the public sphere?

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There are also sociological pressures. There's an undoubted decline in Western European religious belief.

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So less people bother about these things.

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There are political reasons which are echoed in what I've just quoted that religion is seen as something divisive.

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It's something to be put protecting people from.

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It's a threat to social cohesion.

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So the result is that at least in Europe, diversity and pluralism are extolled, and so is the idea of the neutrality of the state.

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And this attitude feeds into the Council of Europe,

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which itself appoints the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights comes out with all of this as well.

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The Council of Europe has been adamant that and I quote from something it said some three years ago, but it includes these remarks since,

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but it said then states must require and that would require religious leaders to take an unambiguous stand in favour of

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the precedents of human rights as set forth in the European Convention of Human Rights over any religious principle.

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The precedence of human rights over any religious principle.

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In other words, human rights and religion are seen as something totally distinct and actually implicitly,

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religion is seen as a threat to human rights, that human rights have to be protected from religion.

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Only a month or so back, the Assembly of the Council of Europe maintains that freedom of religion and freedom to have a philosophical or secular

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worldview are inseparable from unreserved acceptance by all of the fundamental values enshrined in the convention.

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In other words, you really can't claim freedom of religion if you don't believe in human rights.

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Again, I find that the odd way of setting the scene because as I said at the beginning,

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a human right to freedom of religion is part of what human rights consist of.

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So to oppose the two seems very artificial.

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Now, a lot of people in the United States particularly would find all of this exceedingly strange.

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Many Americans of my acquaintance are very keen to stress that religious freedom is the first freedom.

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Now, those of you who are familiar with the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution,

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we know that, of course it does appear first in the First Amendment and therefore, I mean,

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I think the phrase first religion partly picks that up, but it's saying something much more than that,

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namely that the draughters of the Bill of Rights, namely people like James Madison.

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Actually meant to emphasise this. Above all, if you look into the history of Virginia in particular,

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you will see that the people of Madison and Jefferson were adamant that freedom of religion lay at the heart of all democratic freedoms.

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It was partly a reaction to the very rigid attitude of the Church of England established in Virginia.

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And incidentally, it was far more rigid than the church in England was at that time in this country and far more intolerant of nonconformity.

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And in a sense, I didn't think it was living up to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which it should have been.

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But that's a historical byway.

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The point is that they were reacting against an existing situation.

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They believed you can't be free, really free if you're not free to put into effect what you think.

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Most important in life and religion, I suppose, is by definition what people think most important.

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I wouldn't say that everything that people think most important, therefore, is their religion, and that's probably going a bit far off.

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You're probably familiar with the story of the English football manager who was accused of treating soccer as his religion.

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And he said very indignantly, It certainly isn't. It's much more important than that.

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But certainly, nevertheless, religion for most people is what's most important.

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And if you can't put that into action, then that means that you're not able to live by what you believe is most important,

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and therefore you're not really being able to contribute properly to democratic debate.

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Because what you think is most important for the common good is something that actually you're just barred from bringing forth.

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So if religion is regarded as subjective and capricious and divisive and therefore not to be brought into the public arena,

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you are being told you can't deal with your most important judgements about what's right and wrong and to be conducive to the common good.

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And therefore your ability as a citizen to contribute to democratic debate is considerably curtailed anyway.

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That is what Americans believed at the foundation of the United States,

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and they believed that because they had a very different conception of human rights from the one which I've been referring to now.

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I think the clue to a lot of this,

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to the difference in emphasis between the French and your more general European attitudes to rights and the American one is the historic origins.

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If you look at the pronouncements of the Council of Europe nowadays,

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you find that very often the French and perhaps Spanish socialists are the most vociferous in pursuit of the neutrality of the states to religion.

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And this undoubtedly stems from the values of the literary items that the French were,

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in fact, seared by their experience of the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church.

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They regarded reason as emancipation from that from the stifling hand of tradition and authority.

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Therefore, reason was almost in their eyes of necessity, anti-clerical.

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So reason to be freed from all of that hand, in a sense, to be opposed to it.

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So human rights and reason the twin issues in the Enlightenment that to oppress

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most were both meant to be opposed to religion and not stemming from it.

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And that attitude lives on. Religion is a threat to people's freedom.

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It's a threat, a threat to people's free use of reason.

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But that was not the view of rights that occurred in the United States.

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And, of course, 1776 wasn't, however, from 1789 the French Revolution.

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But what fed into each was rather different.

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Jefferson, one of the great leaders and founders of the movement towards independence in the United States,

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was profoundly influenced by the writings of John Locke.

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If you go to Monticello in Virginia, his home, you'll find that he has a portrait of John Locke there.

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And Locke was one of his trinity of, he thought, the three greatest men who had ever lived, the other two and each baker.

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But he was profoundly influenced by Locke's views about natural rights and of the Jefferson was by no means an Orthodox Christian.

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I think he was a sister of some kind. And he did believe that rights were grounded in the Creator.

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Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, of course, says that that we have, in fact, been endowed with rights by our creator.

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And Locke's views were very much stemming from this basic theism.

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It's easy to think of Locke, who's just a British empiricist from Berkeley.

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HUME And in a sense, to look at them through the eyes of the later.

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HUME. But Locke wasn't just an empiricist.

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He was somebody who wrote a book on the reasonableness of Christianity.

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He had a very profound theological vision. He believed that all humans were equal because they were included in the sight of God.

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He believed in freedom because he believed in free will, and his views of reason were of faculty given humans by God.

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Now, in this, he was influenced very much by the Cambridge Satanists who were active in Cambridge in the 17th century at the birth of modern science,

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who influenced some of the scientists who founded the Royal Society,

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who themselves some of their members were actually members of the Royal Society at the beginning.

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Locke was very involved with them, nearly married the daughter of one of them.

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So he he really was involved in them. Their motto was Reason is the candle of the Lord.

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Now, the point about that is that the notion of rights, the notion of reason, the notion of freedom is based in a notion of God.

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In other words, all of that is validated by God.

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It isn't opposed to God. So it's a very different vision of the relation of race and religion from that coming from the later Enlightenment in France.

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And I think this proves on the show, particularly in even contemporary debates,

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even when people don't quite realise where all these views have come from.

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Now, of course, I'm simplifying because the idea that rights are opposed to religion would be contested by many people on the continent.

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Much of American culture wars revolve around how far in fact God should still be on the scene, or how far the state should be absolutely neutral.

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And in some of the pronouncements of the United States Supreme Court,

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you can see they're moving more towards the position of some the pronouncements of the European Court of Human Rights.

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But basically you have two opposing attitudes a view of religion as a force for social cohesion.

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On the one hand, a view of human rights as based on religion.

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And therefore, freedom of religion is going to be the first freedom, because unless we have the freedom to judge what is right,

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we haven't got a freedom even to see the importance of rights and their grounding.

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On the other hand, there's a secularist view of religion in France.

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LA Laicité. That name, incidentally, says a lot, doesn't it?

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Because it's redundant of anti clericalism, it's carries with it a whiff of the importance of the layers.

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We're not going to have any kind of priest craft here.

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Religion is a threat we must be protected from.

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In other words, this is all the difference between in America.

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Still, there is a view that there should be freedom for religion.

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In other words, religion is still thought by many to be a positive force.

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I mean, it may not be something that you sign up to,

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but it's certainly something that can be encouraged within the general ambit of a democratic state.

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It might actually help democracy.

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De Tocqueville in the early 19th century, writing about mad states, thought that it was absolutely essential.

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And in forming American character, it explained the American character that was at the root of American democracy,

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that that explained why the United States was as it was.

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The French model, however, as you said, is contested.

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There was a case recently which you may have come across over the display of crucifixes in Italian schools, not first in the European court.

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It was said that they shouldn't display crucifixes. A lot of these arguments are about symbols, but of course,

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they're obviously standing proxy for something very much deeper about how far religion should be influencing things.

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What is the place of religion in your school? So is the display of a symbol itself something that is a threat?

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Is it suggesting we're imposing religious values or are religious values something not to be feared?

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Instead, very recently,

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the grand chamber that's the final Court of appeal in the European Court overturned the original decision and said quite firmly that freedom

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of religion wasn't the same thing as secularism and that it was quite in order for a country if they wished to display religious symbols.

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It was probably just as well. Some Scandinavians were pointing out they'd have to change their flags and that we'd have to change the union.

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Jack We weren't allowed to use religious symbols because that crosses all of those.

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So but that was much contested, their own tentative people in Europe who feel very strongly that there shouldn't be crucifixes instantly.

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And it was interesting that even Italian Protestants saw the crucifix as a sign of Catholic don't nominate of Catholic domination.

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So they were on the side of removing them. But that is a dispute itself about the origin of human rights.

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What are they grounded on? Because if they're themselves separate from religion, they can't be grounded in religion.

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Locke was undoubtedly connecting religion with natural rights.

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Certainly Americans following him did. Where do notions of human dignity come from?

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For instance, what do they grounded on?

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I find a lot of people who don't want to turn to religion but want to talk about human rights.

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I found at this point they tend to say things like and I think even Dworkin

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and 40 tend to say things like this that we're right to what we believe in.

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I mean, we being I know East Coast Americans for centuries and if you're not an East Coast American, why believe in it?

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There isn't any real rationale as to why rates matter, what they're grounded in, but they're just part of our culture,

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which is a very insubstantial way and or some legal right to say, well, they're just grounded in American law.

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That's what American law consistent.

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But of course, they forget that American law is like that because of the prior theological convictions of the people who drew up the Constitution.

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So without religion, human rights, I think, can easily float free.

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And then it's difficult to know how we teach them to children who would say, well, why does it matter?

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Why do humans matter? And of course, there are plenty of people who don't believe in rights,

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and there are plenty of people who don't believe that there is such a category as humanity to be protected.

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I mean, that's another question, because what about animals, etc.?

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And postmodernists don't believe in the notion of of being human either.

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So there's always a, I think, a slight embarrassment on the part of some postmodernists who want to uphold

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human rights but don't quite want to admit there's such a thing as being human.

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I think it's quite possible that the belief in human rights is actually unsustainable without the religious foundations that gave them meaning.

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Now, this is really therefore to challenge the later enlightenment from the standpoint of the Enlightenment.

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Of course, another way is to say, let's junk, junk the whole talk about human rights, which is another possibility.

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Perhaps it doesn't help our ethical thinking at all.

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But if one thinks it does, if you think there are certain ways that perhaps humans shouldn't be treated, why do you think that?

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I've rather indicated that the slogan of the French Revolution to the account of, say,

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Fraternité is itself grounded in Christian thinking because you just think about it.

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Liberté Freedom. Why does freedom matter now?

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People like Locke, who believed in the importance of human free will.

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Cambridge and it certainly did, would obviously have a theological justification for respecting people's freedom.

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ÉGALITÉ Why is equality important? Why human beings equal and seem to be sometimes in many respects?

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Well, not this quick answer is we are all equal in the sight of God, and that's probably the traditional European answer.

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Why are we cool otherwise? Fraternité Well, I mean,

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I think that obviously the notion of brotherhood makes no sense outside the context of the fatherhood of somebody, obviously God.

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So though that comes from a Christian background and I think rather illustrates the point made by you can have a mass who,

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whilst himself not a believer, does emphasise the fact that Christian values have helped to form Europe and without them Europe will

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change very much that the values that sustain our present ways of thinking and no longer being maintained,

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and that there is therefore a very big question about how far we can go on thinking as we do perhaps like reason for the post-modernist,

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the idea of know the universal human rights just collapses without a theistic basis.

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Now that's certainly the luckier in the American view of human rights, not as, of course,

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the other way out of this conundrum, either God or no human rights is to say, well, we don't want human rights.

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And that's, I think, part of the challenge.

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But just reflect how the notion of human rights are so built into the structure of our law and our society at the moment.

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If we say we're no longer going to bother about human rights,

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that changes a very great deal very quickly because the whole tendency over the last well,

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I suppose starting since the war with the UN Declaration of Human Rights is to stress an issue of human rights more and more,

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and it's become a very, very powerful political and rhetorical two,

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and indeed very often a beneficial one if you're facing non totalitarian governments.

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It certainly has had a powerful influence in breaking down communism in Eastern Europe and no

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doubt it's a slogan piece of rhetoric that has its influence in the Middle East at the moment.

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But what's the human rights depend on?

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Again, there is this continuing issue.

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Now, remember, we started out from that, I was really suggesting that human rights are very often being opposed to religion.

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What I'm suggesting is that human rights don't can't trump religion because they need religion.

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They don't make much sense without a religious basis.

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I wouldn't go so far as to say specifically Christian one. It may be that you can have as Jefferson and they did a more general theistic view.

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Indeed, at the start of the French Revolution, they were still talking in vague, atheistic terms to ground rights, but they soon forgot that.

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But there's no doubt that in Europe we do have still a Christian heritage, much contested, much fought over.

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But it explains a lot of our thinking about rights.

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Take that away, have rights floating free.

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How, therefore, do we go on to sustain that?

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Can we indeed sustain our ideas? Right.

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I've also suggested that we can't actually sustain notions of reason and reason as above all the Enlightenment category.

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It was nearly a category of the 17th century enlightenment.

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Grounding it in God. It was the category of the 18th century enlightenment, seeing it as an emancipatory mechanism from religion.

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But in more recent years,

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postmodernists have reacted against that and wanted to revert to notions of different traditions and scorns the notion of an all embracing reason.

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So if you want to defend the notion of reason, as somebody like Nietzsche did not, you then have to think, what is it based on?

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We can't just assume the notion of rationality.

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Perhaps the same thing applies to rights.

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If we want to continue talking about rights, we need to assume a religious basis.

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So human rights can't be opposed to religion. They need it.

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If you don't want human rights, you have to look elsewhere for human rights.

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And you're just.