As has been said, my title is Human Rights versus Religion.
And that might seem a bit curious because those of you who are familiar with human rights
documents might realise that the right to freedom of religion is written in every one of them.
And I talk later about just how important many people may think it is,
but certainly that people have a right to freedom of religion is thought to be essential.
I mean, it's the one thing you can do rights that like the right to life is the one
thing you can be sure you'll find in any human rights document in this country.
I think we're particularly concerned with the European Convention of Human Rights,
and there there is a very clear, absolute right to freedom of religion and belief.
Now, it's only a right to believe what you want when it comes to manifestation.
And the second part of the clause, a lot in freedom of religion qualifies the rights to manifest it.
Because, of course, obviously, if you want to manifest your religion, there are some ways that which might be not terribly conducive to morality.
If your religion says that you should sacrifice people or eat people.
Well, religions can say all kinds of funny things. Obviously, there are some things that religion says that a democratic society could not allow.
So that is, I suppose, one reason why we find the right qualified.
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,
freedom of religious belief particularly mean if you can't manifest it, it doesn't mean very much if manifesting.
It means even talking about it, saying what you believe then.
Quite clearly a totalitarian regime which wants to suppress religion is quite happy if you believe what you want,
as long as you never show it in your behaviour or your actions, your speech.
So if everything is in manifestation, then that would suggest that actually the right,
the absolute right to freedom of belief has become very attenuated.
Now, this just comes back to a basic issue about human rights, that many people think that human rights are of an absolute nature.
They trump other things. That's part of their point.
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.
We can all think of examples. Particular example might be the right to express your religious belief,
but that may clash with the right of other people not to be discriminated against.
And it's actually particularly important to clash nowadays when you might get a clash between religious rights and the rights of homosexuals.
So there is therefore a very great possibility of clash between rights.
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,
and then the whole notion of rights just goes out of the window.
Another possibility is that some rights that's more important than others.
There is no hierarchy of rights. Many human rights people talk, say,
because it may very well be you just quietly forget some rights have not been very important and emphasise others as being important.
Now this all goes back to the basic issue how rights important for morality anyway,
because utilitarians consequentialist generally might think that the notion of an absolute rights,
regardless of consequences, is exceptionally dangerous. And we all know that Utilitarians traditionally thought the rights embody nonsense on stilts.
So the question is anyway, are human rights terribly helpful when we talk about morality in ordinary life?
Of course, nowadays it's very easy to assume that rights are the only thing that matter in morality.
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,
who has a responsibility for meeting it. So that, again, is another problem about rights.
But the notion of human rights, it is on everybody's lips.
It's part of the currency, the rhetoric of politics.
So it's I think it's important to see how it is actually work.
Looking at how far it does elucidate and inform our moral views.
Just before I came here this afternoon,
I was reading an email from the Republic of Ireland where people were grumbling about the Irish Commission of Human Rights,
which has just issued a very lengthy 100 page document concerning the position of church schools in the Republic of Ireland.
Now, the point about church groups and of course their long established mainly Catholic,
that the point about those schools is that they're there presumably to,
if not exactly inculcate religious faith, at least to somehow express it in education.
And those who think that human rights are important will say yes.
But what about those who are not Catholic?
What about those who do wish to be suffering indoctrination or proselytising words that are used in the document but not defined?
What do we do about that?
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.
So here you see human rights being always used as a weapon in practice against religion,
that you have a traditional institutional set up of Catholic schools and then adoption of human rights being introduced.
That suggests that actually imposing any kind of religious view and imposing is another word for just teaching is somehow to be ruled out.
Now, this, I think, exemplifies a basic attitude in Europe nowadays, where the role of religion in the public sphere is very much contested.
There are philosophical arguments being put forward for it that religion is of its nature, irrational faith and reason, a separate.
It's seen as subjective beyond the scope of rational debate.
Now there's a long philosophical argument about faith and reason.
And, I mean, it's almost the most important issue in philosophy, religion.
So I'm not going to get involved too much in that.
But just to point out that there is this attitude very prevalent, more prevalent in non-free self-proclaimed and philosophical circles.
But let me quote from a law case in the England and Wales High Court from the 24 February this year.
Where they, in fact, quote a previous law case of last year where Lord Justice laws made what I thought were very tendentious statements.
Now, the important thing here is that the thing is resonating through the courts that one judge makes pronouncements that seem highly controversial,
then picked up by the judges, and they become, in effect, the law of the land.
They say the conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position
on the grounds that it's espoused only by the adherents of a particular faith is deeply unprincipled.
It imposes compulsory law not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion.
This must be so because in the eye of everyone, save the believer religious face is necessarily subjective.
Being in communicable by any kind of proof or evidence the ascertainment of such a truth,
if it is true, and that paradoxically they do accept it, might be.
It lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society.
I think that word reasonable perhaps echoes the work of John Rules.
Therefore, it lies only in the heart of the believer whose alone bound by it no one else
is or can be so bound to less by his own free choice to accept its claims.
The promulgation of law further up, the protection of the position held on religious grounds cannot be justified.
It is irrational. It prefers the subjective over the subjective.
Its divisive, capricious and arbitrary.
So we have words like subjective, irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary being referred to religion.
I wish once thoughts by in the kind of waning days of logical positivism,
I am sure you would approve very much of that kind of statement really in spirit anyway.
And it's really assuming, as people like Richard Dawkins do nowadays, that proof or evidence is only scientific proof or evidence.
Anything else is beyond the scope of reason. Faith is of its nature, subjective.
What if you believe that, of course, religion can have no place in the public sphere?
There are also sociological pressures. There's an undoubted decline in Western European religious belief.
So less people bother about these things.
There are political reasons which are echoed in what I've just quoted that religion is seen as something divisive.
It's something to be put protecting people from.
It's a threat to social cohesion.
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.
And this attitude feeds into the Council of Europe,
which itself appoints the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights comes out with all of this as well.
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,
but it said then states must require and that would require religious leaders to take an unambiguous stand in favour of
the precedents of human rights as set forth in the European Convention of Human Rights over any religious principle.
The precedence of human rights over any religious principle.
In other words, human rights and religion are seen as something totally distinct and actually implicitly,
religion is seen as a threat to human rights, that human rights have to be protected from religion.
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
worldview are inseparable from unreserved acceptance by all of the fundamental values enshrined in the convention.
In other words, you really can't claim freedom of religion if you don't believe in human rights.
Again, I find that the odd way of setting the scene because as I said at the beginning,
a human right to freedom of religion is part of what human rights consist of.
So to oppose the two seems very artificial.
Now, a lot of people in the United States particularly would find all of this exceedingly strange.
Many Americans of my acquaintance are very keen to stress that religious freedom is the first freedom.
Now, those of you who are familiar with the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution,
we know that, of course it does appear first in the First Amendment and therefore, I mean,
I think the phrase first religion partly picks that up, but it's saying something much more than that,
namely that the draughters of the Bill of Rights, namely people like James Madison.
Actually meant to emphasise this. Above all, if you look into the history of Virginia in particular,
you will see that the people of Madison and Jefferson were adamant that freedom of religion lay at the heart of all democratic freedoms.
It was partly a reaction to the very rigid attitude of the Church of England established in Virginia.
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.
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.
But that's a historical byway.
The point is that they were reacting against an existing situation.
They believed you can't be free, really free if you're not free to put into effect what you think.
Most important in life and religion, I suppose, is by definition what people think most important.
I wouldn't say that everything that people think most important, therefore, is their religion, and that's probably going a bit far off.
You're probably familiar with the story of the English football manager who was accused of treating soccer as his religion.
And he said very indignantly, It certainly isn't. It's much more important than that.
But certainly, nevertheless, religion for most people is what's most important.
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,
and therefore you're not really being able to contribute properly to democratic debate.
Because what you think is most important for the common good is something that actually you're just barred from bringing forth.
So if religion is regarded as subjective and capricious and divisive and therefore not to be brought into the public arena,
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.
And therefore your ability as a citizen to contribute to democratic debate is considerably curtailed anyway.
That is what Americans believed at the foundation of the United States,
and they believed that because they had a very different conception of human rights from the one which I've been referring to now.
I think the clue to a lot of this,
to the difference in emphasis between the French and your more general European attitudes to rights and the American one is the historic origins.
If you look at the pronouncements of the Council of Europe nowadays,
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.
And this undoubtedly stems from the values of the literary items that the French were,
in fact, seared by their experience of the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church.
They regarded reason as emancipation from that from the stifling hand of tradition and authority.
Therefore, reason was almost in their eyes of necessity, anti-clerical.
So reason to be freed from all of that hand, in a sense, to be opposed to it.
So human rights and reason the twin issues in the Enlightenment that to oppress
most were both meant to be opposed to religion and not stemming from it.
And that attitude lives on. Religion is a threat to people's freedom.
It's a threat, a threat to people's free use of reason.
But that was not the view of rights that occurred in the United States.
And, of course, 1776 wasn't, however, from 1789 the French Revolution.
But what fed into each was rather different.
Jefferson, one of the great leaders and founders of the movement towards independence in the United States,
was profoundly influenced by the writings of John Locke.
If you go to Monticello in Virginia, his home, you'll find that he has a portrait of John Locke there.
And Locke was one of his trinity of, he thought, the three greatest men who had ever lived, the other two and each baker.
But he was profoundly influenced by Locke's views about natural rights and of the Jefferson was by no means an Orthodox Christian.
I think he was a sister of some kind. And he did believe that rights were grounded in the Creator.
Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, of course, says that that we have, in fact, been endowed with rights by our creator.
And Locke's views were very much stemming from this basic theism.
It's easy to think of Locke, who's just a British empiricist from Berkeley.
HUME And in a sense, to look at them through the eyes of the later.
HUME. But Locke wasn't just an empiricist.
He was somebody who wrote a book on the reasonableness of Christianity.
He had a very profound theological vision. He believed that all humans were equal because they were included in the sight of God.
He believed in freedom because he believed in free will, and his views of reason were of faculty given humans by God.
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,
who influenced some of the scientists who founded the Royal Society,
who themselves some of their members were actually members of the Royal Society at the beginning.
Locke was very involved with them, nearly married the daughter of one of them.
So he he really was involved in them. Their motto was Reason is the candle of the Lord.
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.
In other words, all of that is validated by God.
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.
And I think this proves on the show, particularly in even contemporary debates,
even when people don't quite realise where all these views have come from.
Now, of course, I'm simplifying because the idea that rights are opposed to religion would be contested by many people on the continent.
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.
And in some of the pronouncements of the United States Supreme Court,
you can see they're moving more towards the position of some the pronouncements of the European Court of Human Rights.
But basically you have two opposing attitudes a view of religion as a force for social cohesion.
On the one hand, a view of human rights as based on religion.
And therefore, freedom of religion is going to be the first freedom, because unless we have the freedom to judge what is right,
we haven't got a freedom even to see the importance of rights and their grounding.
On the other hand, there's a secularist view of religion in France.
LA Laicité. That name, incidentally, says a lot, doesn't it?
Because it's redundant of anti clericalism, it's carries with it a whiff of the importance of the layers.
We're not going to have any kind of priest craft here.
Religion is a threat we must be protected from.
In other words, this is all the difference between in America.
Still, there is a view that there should be freedom for religion.
In other words, religion is still thought by many to be a positive force.
I mean, it may not be something that you sign up to,
but it's certainly something that can be encouraged within the general ambit of a democratic state.
It might actually help democracy.
De Tocqueville in the early 19th century, writing about mad states, thought that it was absolutely essential.
And in forming American character, it explained the American character that was at the root of American democracy,
that that explained why the United States was as it was.
The French model, however, as you said, is contested.
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.
It was said that they shouldn't display crucifixes. A lot of these arguments are about symbols, but of course,
they're obviously standing proxy for something very much deeper about how far religion should be influencing things.
What is the place of religion in your school? So is the display of a symbol itself something that is a threat?
Is it suggesting we're imposing religious values or are religious values something not to be feared?
Instead, very recently,
the grand chamber that's the final Court of appeal in the European Court overturned the original decision and said quite firmly that freedom
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.
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.
Jack We weren't allowed to use religious symbols because that crosses all of those.
So but that was much contested, their own tentative people in Europe who feel very strongly that there shouldn't be crucifixes instantly.
And it was interesting that even Italian Protestants saw the crucifix as a sign of Catholic don't nominate of Catholic domination.
So they were on the side of removing them. But that is a dispute itself about the origin of human rights.
What are they grounded on? Because if they're themselves separate from religion, they can't be grounded in religion.
Locke was undoubtedly connecting religion with natural rights.
Certainly Americans following him did. Where do notions of human dignity come from?
For instance, what do they grounded on?
I find a lot of people who don't want to turn to religion but want to talk about human rights.
I found at this point they tend to say things like and I think even Dworkin
and 40 tend to say things like this that we're right to what we believe in.
I mean, we being I know East Coast Americans for centuries and if you're not an East Coast American, why believe in it?
There isn't any real rationale as to why rates matter, what they're grounded in, but they're just part of our culture,
which is a very insubstantial way and or some legal right to say, well, they're just grounded in American law.
That's what American law consistent.
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.
So without religion, human rights, I think, can easily float free.
And then it's difficult to know how we teach them to children who would say, well, why does it matter?
Why do humans matter? And of course, there are plenty of people who don't believe in rights,
and there are plenty of people who don't believe that there is such a category as humanity to be protected.
I mean, that's another question, because what about animals, etc.?
And postmodernists don't believe in the notion of of being human either.
So there's always a, I think, a slight embarrassment on the part of some postmodernists who want to uphold
human rights but don't quite want to admit there's such a thing as being human.
I think it's quite possible that the belief in human rights is actually unsustainable without the religious foundations that gave them meaning.
Now, this is really therefore to challenge the later enlightenment from the standpoint of the Enlightenment.
Of course, another way is to say, let's junk, junk the whole talk about human rights, which is another possibility.
Perhaps it doesn't help our ethical thinking at all.
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?
I've rather indicated that the slogan of the French Revolution to the account of, say,
Fraternité is itself grounded in Christian thinking because you just think about it.
Liberté Freedom. Why does freedom matter now?
People like Locke, who believed in the importance of human free will.
Cambridge and it certainly did, would obviously have a theological justification for respecting people's freedom.
ÉGALITÉ Why is equality important? Why human beings equal and seem to be sometimes in many respects?
Well, not this quick answer is we are all equal in the sight of God, and that's probably the traditional European answer.
Why are we cool otherwise? Fraternité Well, I mean,
I think that obviously the notion of brotherhood makes no sense outside the context of the fatherhood of somebody, obviously God.
So though that comes from a Christian background and I think rather illustrates the point made by you can have a mass who,
whilst himself not a believer, does emphasise the fact that Christian values have helped to form Europe and without them Europe will
change very much that the values that sustain our present ways of thinking and no longer being maintained,
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,
the idea of know the universal human rights just collapses without a theistic basis.
Now that's certainly the luckier in the American view of human rights, not as, of course,
the other way out of this conundrum, either God or no human rights is to say, well, we don't want human rights.
And that's, I think, part of the challenge.
But just reflect how the notion of human rights are so built into the structure of our law and our society at the moment.
If we say we're no longer going to bother about human rights,
that changes a very great deal very quickly because the whole tendency over the last well,
I suppose starting since the war with the UN Declaration of Human Rights is to stress an issue of human rights more and more,
and it's become a very, very powerful political and rhetorical two,
and indeed very often a beneficial one if you're facing non totalitarian governments.
It certainly has had a powerful influence in breaking down communism in Eastern Europe and no
doubt it's a slogan piece of rhetoric that has its influence in the Middle East at the moment.
But what's the human rights depend on?
Again, there is this continuing issue.
Now, remember, we started out from that, I was really suggesting that human rights are very often being opposed to religion.
What I'm suggesting is that human rights don't can't trump religion because they need religion.
They don't make much sense without a religious basis.
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.
Indeed, at the start of the French Revolution, they were still talking in vague, atheistic terms to ground rights, but they soon forgot that.
But there's no doubt that in Europe we do have still a Christian heritage, much contested, much fought over.
But it explains a lot of our thinking about rights.
Take that away, have rights floating free.
How, therefore, do we go on to sustain that?
Can we indeed sustain our ideas? Right.
I've also suggested that we can't actually sustain notions of reason and reason as above all the Enlightenment category.
It was nearly a category of the 17th century enlightenment.
Grounding it in God. It was the category of the 18th century enlightenment, seeing it as an emancipatory mechanism from religion.
But in more recent years,
postmodernists have reacted against that and wanted to revert to notions of different traditions and scorns the notion of an all embracing reason.
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?
We can't just assume the notion of rationality.
Perhaps the same thing applies to rights.
If we want to continue talking about rights, we need to assume a religious basis.
So human rights can't be opposed to religion. They need it.
If you don't want human rights, you have to look elsewhere for human rights.
And you're just.