I appreciate Fr. Araujo's contribution to the conversation on God and human rights, but his observation prompts a further question. If God is "the objective source on which to rely to resolve the conflict" over the content of human rights, how do we discern what that source says without relying on highly subjective factors (our interpretation of Scripture, our culture, etc.)? If you look at the heated battles among theists about human rights down through the centuries, it seems like the objectivity of God as a source of content is, at best, elusive. (I am not at all questioning the fact that belief in God can provide a rich impetus to embrace human rights in general.) It might help to use a specific example -- let's take women's rights. How does a belief in God provide a framework for women's rights that is more capable of authoritatively and accessibly settling disputes over content than the framework built by the atheist?
Friday, August 31, 2007
How is God relevant to the content of human rights?
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
God's Warriors
Over at First Things, Nathaniel Peters reviews Christiane Amanpour's series, God's Warriors, which aired (to relatively high ratings) on CNN, and which Rick blogged about earlier. Here's an excerpt from Peters:
When speaking in her own voice, Amanpour generally echoes the claims heard often in the media. In the first installment, for instance, she begins by defining the common trait of all three types: “They have in common . . . the belief that modern society has lost its way. They say that God is the answer. They want God part of their daily lives, back in the seat of power.”
Perhaps. And yet, except for that last clause, this definition describes many religious believers, not all of them extremists. There seemed to be few threads that connected God’s warriors, beside the fact that religion informed their politics to some degree. Indeed, Amanpour tends to over-generalize the parallels among the three groups she examines. She looks, for example, at the rules about skirt length and unsupervised Internet use for the Christian teenagers in BattleCry. These rules immediately remind Amanpour of the Taliban—although they are, in fact, little different from rules that one might find at any Christian school. Longer skirts, one must note, do not automatically portend theocracy.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Not desiring, but still intending
Regarding Mother Teresa's dark night half-century of the soul, a reader kindly reminded me of this great quote from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. As Screwtape wrote to Wormwood,
"Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."
Thursday, August 23, 2007
"The silence and emptiness is so great . . ."
Time has a long article on a new compilation of Mother Teresa's letters to her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. An excerpt:
The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."
That absence seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta, and — except for a five-week break in 1959 — never abated. Although perpetually cheery in public, the Teresa of the letters lived in a state of deep and abiding spiritual pain. In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. She is acutely aware of the discrepancy between her inner state and her public demeanor. "The smile," she writes, is "a mask" or "a cloak that covers everything." Similarly, she wonders whether she is engaged in verbal deception. "I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God — tender, personal love," she remarks to an adviser. "If you were [there], you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Balkin on God and Human Rights
Jack Balkin weighs in on our conversation regarding the relationship between human rights and belief in God. He mentions the treatment of Jews within the papal states, and suggests that we have:
assumed that belief in God is good for human rights because God himself approves of universal human rights, religious tolerance, and human equality. But that is not generally true of what people thought God wanted historically, even within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Throughout most of human history, God (and different gods) have been remarkably partial, at least if we credit the moral and political beliefs of people who professed to believe most fervently in Him throughout the ages, and who justified their practices based on their belief in Him.
For religion to ground universal human rights in the very attractive way that the previous discussion has assumed, that religion must be of a very special sort, and, I would suggest, it must be of a form that arises most commonly following the Enlightenment, when older versions of religious belief were repeatedly questioned and reshaped by religious strife, political necessity, the rise of modern secular institutions, and the growth of science; these historical phenomena -- and not simply belief in God per se -- led to increasing religious tolerance between sects and increasingly capacious and generalized conceptions of human liberty and human equality. That is to say, the sort of belief in God that most strongly undergirds the discourse of universal human rights as we understand it today is the sort of belief in God that has been chastened by and reshaped by several centuries of modernity, secularism, and religious skepticism.
Prof. Balkin is right to point out this underlying premise of our thesis, and that's why my claim has been fairly limited. I see something distinctive in the fact (if it is a fact) that we were created by a God who wants a relationship with us. But I can't speak with any confidence about the content of the human rights that would flow from that fact. Perhaps God wants to reveal his glory to humankind through displays of awesome power against those who reject his chosen prophets' teachings. Perhaps the natural order is built on a rigid human hierarchy. If I was looking for a human rights advocate, Aquinas and Augustine would be nowhere near the top of my list. Admittedly, I have the good fortune of pushing this conversation in a post-John Courtney Murray, "I'm OK You're OK" society of blurred religious lines, and in this context, a belief in a loving creator is a potentially rich and distinctive resource for supporting human rights. The fact of creation has always been a potential resource, of course, and our own failure, as believers, to recognize it as such is one reason why non-believers (and many believers) are understandably skeptical.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Does Witchcraft Provide a Rational Foundation for Human Rights?
Over at Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha rejoins the conversation on the relationship between human rights and belief in God, responding to recent posts by Fr. Araujo and me. An excerpt:
Rob and Father Araujo, it should be noted, are not taking the same position. Rob (like Perry) is arguing that religious belief alone, even false belief, provides a superior grounding for human rights, whereas Father Araujo identifies the superiority of religion for morality and human rights in the “objectivity that surrounds God’s existence.” Father Araujo, moreover, extends the argument beyond human rights to claim that the morality and moral code of religious believers is superior to “the atheist’s morality and moral code.”
In response to Father Araujo, I can only say that if God indeed exists (and if it is God’s will that humans have inherent dignity), then he is correct: human rights and morality have an objective existence. But the essential question, as always, is whether God exists—which he simply assumes.
In response to Rob’s argument that even a false belief in God provides a superior rational grounding for human rights, I offer a simple (and unoriginal) question: What if belief in God is like belief in witchcraft?
Believers in witchcraft can, to be sure, have an internally coherent belief system that amounts to a religion—and let’s also say that inherent human dignity and human rights and a deity are part of their witchcraft belief system. Would Perry and Rob assert that this belief system is “rational” and provides a superior foundation for human rights? Does not the “rationality” of the belief system hinge upon the truth of witchcraft (rather than merely belief in witchcraft) and upon the existence of their claimed deity?
If the answer to the latter question is “yes,” then (for the same reasons) the rationality and coherence of religious belief systems also rest on the truth of God’s existence, which has never been proven. Consequently, religion provides no more solid a rational foundation for human rights than any other ungrounded moral belief system.
My answer to Brian's question is yes, witchcraft could provide a rational basis for human rights if 1) living consistently with the claims of witchcraft required observance of human rights; and 2) the person in question believed that the claims of witchcraft are objectively true. Let's assume that God does not exist, and that believers are deluded, while atheists see things as they truly are. In my view, it is the fact of the delusion that still allows for the rational foundation of human rights. I'm not equating "rational" with universally accessible and compelling; I'm focusing more on the rational relationship between an authentically held belief regarding our existence (not simply wishful thinking) and recognition of human rights. Atheists know they are creating human rights; believers rationally follow the implications of reality (as they perceive it) to the unavoidable conclusion that humans naturally possess rights.
And again, to be clear, none of this is to suggest that religious voices should be privileged in human rights discourse or that non-religious voices are less legitimate or welcome. It is simply to point out that religious voices bring a dimension to the conversation that is not easily replaced by a one-size-fits-all language that has been stripped of any sense that human dignity emanates from a source greater than ourselves.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Why Does the Objectivity of Religiously Grounded Human Rights Matter?
Fr. Araujo writes that "[t]he subjectivity that flaws the atheist’s conception of human rights is substituted with the objectivity that surrounds God’s existence." My question is, how can that objectivity be demonstrated? If it cannot be demonstrated, how and why does it matter to the cause of human rights? It seems that religiously grounded conceptions of human rights are inescapably subjective and are based, at least in part, on believers' own experiences of the human condition and contrasting interpretations of divine revelation, as evidenced by evolving Christian convictions regarding slavery, religious liberty, women's rights, etc. I agree that a belief in a God who seeks human relationship provides a firmer foundation than atheism for human dignity, but that foundation simply begins the conversation about the content of human rights. In that regard, the atheist and believer do not seem that far apart.
Emotion, Informed Consent, and Abortion
Syracuse law prof Jeremy Blumenthal has posted his new paper, Abortion, Persuasion, and Emotion: Implications of Social Science Research on Emotion for Reading Casey. (HT: Solum) Here is the abstract:
Although abortion jurisprudence under Casey condones State efforts to persuade a woman to forego an abortion in favor of childbirth, the opinion's “truthful and not misleading” language can be read more broadly than it traditionally has. Specifically, even a truthful message may mislead when it inappropriately takes advantage of emotional influence to bias an individual's decision away from the decision that would be made in a non-emotional, fully informed, state. Drawing on the insights of empirical research in the social sciences, I suggest that the sort of emotional information that many States now provide in their “informed consent” statutes can lead to such inappropriate emotional influence, and thus should be examined more closely than heretofore. This broader reading, taking into account empirical research that gives a better idea of individual decision-making, suggests that States' informed consent statutes have the potential to be an impermissible burden on the exercise of a woman's autonomous decision-making about an abortion precisely because they are calculated to bias a woman's free choice, not inform it.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Religion and Human Rights: Discerning v. Creating
I've talked with Brian Tamanaha quite a bit in the past about his point regarding the relationship between human rights and a belief in God, so I might not be raising anything new. And to be clear, I do not believe that atheists are demonstrably less moral than believers are. In my view, it takes a significant level of thoughtfulness and proactive moral agency to reject the idea of God in our culture (though that may be changing); most of the atheists I know have spent a lot more time thinking about these issues and taking ownership of a meaningful moral code than most Christians I know. Nevertheless, let me take a crack at showing why a belief in God is, in general, more supportive of a belief in human rights than atheism is.
I agree that both the atheist and theist must commit themselves to human rights by an act of faith: for the theist, it's a faith in a certain type of God, and for the atheist, faith in the intrinsic value (?) of human beings. But the atheist knows that his belief in human rights is an act of will -- he knows there is no reality that compels him to recognize human rights; it's more accurate to say that he's creating human rights because, in light of human experience and his observations of reality, they work. For the theist, though, his faith in human rights is simply recognizing the implications of his faith in God. And so I disagree with Brian's assertion that it's the existence of God, not the belief in God's existence, that matters for human rights. It is the belief that matters. Whether or not God actually exists, if I believe in the God that is at the center of the world's major religions -- that is, a God who wants to be in relationship with his creation, thereby signaling human beings' inestimable value in God's eyes -- then human rights are an unavoidable implication of that belief for anyone who wants to live in harmony with God's design.
As for Brian's question on the value of this whole line of inquiry, I obviously can't speak for Michael, but I would venture to say that the point is not to marginalize the many non-religious voices who have been and remain essential to the struggle for human rights, but to make clear that, in a public square where religion is often greeted as an archaic and divisive obstacle to human understanding, religion might still hold the best hope for instilling a deep commitment to human dignity and worth..
Dean Dobranski Speaks Out
There have been several reports on MoJ about recent events at Ave Maria Law School. Now the school's dean gives his side of the story in an interview with the blog, Above the Law. Here's an excerpt:
There’s no question that the relocation to Florida is a catalyst for the discontent. There is a significant group of people who don’t want to go and don’t want the school to go. And they’re doing whatever they can to stop it.
We also have a group of people here who have a very different idea of governance from the Board’s views, my views, and the ABA’s. They think that decisions like this can only be made if they are part of the decisionmaking process, as opposed to giving their input. They wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than sitting down with the board and making the decision about the move.
I'll leave it to others with direct knowledge of the situation to judge whether this accurately reflects the nature of the faculty's discontent.
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