Human rights

Two stories about churches of various sorts.

The first is a bunch of them in the US. Leaders from Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Lutheran, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities in the United States have signed an open letter about the "serious consequences of redefining marriage". They say these consequences will ...

... arise in a broad range of legal contexts, because altering the civil definition of "marriage" does not change one law, but hundreds, even thousands, at once. By a single stroke, every law where rights depend on marital status—such as employment discrimination, employment benefits, adoption, education, healthcare, elder care, housing, property, and taxation—will change so that same-sex sexual relationships must be treated as if they were marriage. That requirement, in turn, will apply to religious people and groups in the ordinary course of their many private or public occupations and ministries—including running schools, hospitals, nursing homes and other housing facilities, providing adoption and counseling services, and many others.

Not content with confining their ideas about marriage to their own communities, the church leaders want to stop the liberalisation of marriage law and remove the legal sanctions for discrimination against homosexuals and others. This "redefinition of marriage" is being described as "a direct attack on religious freedom". Click here to read about it.

The second story is about a "crisis of faith", according to some religious leaders, as the idea of "de-baptism", started as a joke by the National Secular Society, has caught on across Europe and America. The NSS's "de-baptism certificate" has been downloaded from its website at least 100,000 times, while it's been reported that "the church has put in place a new evangelizing strategy to more strongly encourage parents to get their children baptized".

A Humanist contribution to an inter-faith Celebration of Human Rights hosted by the Ipswich & District Bahá’í community at Ipswich Central Library, 10 December 2010. The theme was Article 26:2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘Spiritual Education’: Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

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The Article we’re celebrating today refers to “Spiritual Education”. I have a problem with this, because I don’t know what “spiritual” means. I know what other people say it means, but there are several definitions, some of them religious, and I find them mostly too vague to agree with them. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll ignore that part of the Article and talk about the rest: about education, and about understanding and tolerance. These are things without which no civil society can function properly, and without which there is endless scope for disharmony and conflict.

For the latest news about Leo Igwe in Nigeria, see Think Humanism.

Women with insecure immigration status fleeing violence cannot access the benefits they need to get protection and support. Due to their extreme vulnerability, immediate action is needed; the UK is in breach of its international human rights obligations while this situation persists.

Amnesty UK is organising a mass lobby of parliament on Wednesday November 4th to urge the UK government to ensure equal protection for all women facing violence in the UK. It's hoped that hundreds of people will go to the House of Commons to raise the same concern with their MPs at the same time.

To find out more, go to the Amnesty website.

And if he smite him with an instrument of iron ... the murderer shall surely be put to death (Numbers 35:16).

Amnesty International has issued an urgent appeal for a man facing execution in three weeks' time despite the fact that jurors at his trial consulted passages from the Bible in deciding his fate. Thirty-two-year-old Khristian Oliver is set to be executed in Texas, USA on 5 November. He was sentenced to death in 1999 for a murder committed during a burglary. While deciding whether he should live or die, jurors at his trial consulted copies of the Bible, including text supporting the death penalty, calling into serious question their impartiality.

Read more on the Amnesty UK website.

Does anyone actually believe Human Rights exist?

In response to letters in today’s East Anglian Daily Times (File Attachment: EADT prayer letters.jpg (185 KB) about the nurse facing disciplinary action for praying for a patient, I’ve sent the following reply:

As an old age pensioner I've been around far too long to believe you can change the minds of the god deluded. The sheer implausibility of the supernatural can only be accepted by working it out for yourself, as recalled by the young David Attenborough, now in his eighties, who recently said, "I remember looking at my headmaster delivering a sermon, a classicist, extremely clever … and thinking, he can't really believe all that, can he? How incredible."