The creation story in the Book of Genesis, which both Christians and Jews regard as part of Holy Writ and that will be read in synagogues next Saturday as the start of a new cycle of weekly readings from Scripture, points to the fundamental link between religion and human rights.
By: Dow Marmur Columnist, Published on Sun Oct 12 2014
The creation story in the Book of Genesis, which both Christians and Jews regard as part of Holy Writ and that will be read in synagogues next Saturday as the start of a new cycle of weekly readings from Scripture, points to the fundamental link between religion and human rights.
The Biblical myth that we trace back our origins to Adam and Eve is to tell us that we’re all equal and all entitled to the same rights on earth. And the assertion that God created humanity in the divine image doesn’t seek to argue science but morality. It affirms that the life of every human being is sacred. To violate it is both a crime against humanity and an affront to God.
Though neither of these Biblical teachings is referred to in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they’re implicitly at the core of its solemn affirmation of the inherent dignity of all members of the human family.
That’s probably why so many religious leaders — Christians, Muslims, Buddhist, Jews and others — have been in the forefront of the human rights struggle in our time: Mahatma Gandhi of India, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, Shirin Abadi of Iran, Oscar Romero of El Salvador, Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel of the United States, and countless others.
Tragically in religion no less than in all other spheres of human activity — including human rights advocacy — people have a knack of turning the noblest ideals into their opposites. That’s how human rights abuses have come to be perpetrated by religious people, sometimes scandalously in the name of God, not only in faraway lands but also close to home, and not only by believers against “infidels” or between adherents of different religions but, alas, even within each denomination, sometimes within the same community.
Perhaps the absence of explicit Biblical references in the Universal Declaration was originally intended to make it accessible to people of all faiths and none. But the omission has since been used as an argument for regarding human rights as a challenge and an alternative to religion, not as its natural ally.
At times it seems that antagonism to the teachings of Scripture and to those who seek to live by it has become part of the radical anti-religious human rights canon.
Yet cooperation between exponents of religion and of human rights is essential for both. One of the advocates of making the connection is Larry Cox, who combines his duties as Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International with a position at the Union Theological Seminary in New York.
In an article last April in the online journal Open Democracy that has informed this column, Cox argues that “faith-based action has been, and still is, one of the most important forces undermining repressive political systems everywhere.” His essay is called, “Human rights must get religion.”
The same issue also carries an article by Jack Snyder of Columbia University. Though Snyder admits that “religion may be a strange bed partner for human rights, given the intolerance that sometimes accompanies religious zeal,” he nevertheless concludes that “the human rights agenda may need a leg up from progressive religion to gain organizational and emotional traction.”
Progressive religion! One way of engaging in fashionable attacks on conventional religion is to point to its reactionary wings as evidence of the intolerance and bigotry of all religion.
What’s often deliberately overlooked are the powerful progressive religious forces rooted in Biblical teachings about human equality and human rights that challenge those who abuse these rights. Surely, to mobilize such forces must be in the interest of every genuine humanitarian.
Dow Marmur is rabbi emeritus at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple. His column appears every other week.