What can I do when logged in?

You can submit new articles, so we can make unique versions of them and distribute them for you.
If you want to simply publish the same article on 800 websites, you can tell us to do that.
You can see the archive and current status of all your article distributions.
You can order any number of high-quality articles - just let us know your keywords.
You can browse the archive of all the articles we have written for you.
You can order our Complete Service (10 high-quality articles plus 10 article distributions).
You can purchase more credits for our services and check your affiliate earnings.
Much more ...

SpinDistribute.com Article Directory

The following article was published in our article directory on August 11, 2012.
Learn more about SpinDistribute Article Distribution System.

Religion, Faith & Human Rights

Article Category: Advice

Author Name: Rebekah Silliman

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has actually made a profound effect in battling injustice and is "a landmark in the history of moral consciousness", states the Archbishop of Canterbury in a lecture on Human Rights and Religious Faith at the Globe Council of Churches Ecumenical Centre in Geneva.

Nonetheless, Dr Williams also mentions existing tensions around the discourses of rights, faith and society. He observes that there has been a more recent trend to develop Human Rights as a solely universal legal code around the entitlements claimed by people and in this lecture he delivers an alternative approach that takes into account the social and the community parts of human interaction - which is an integral part of religious belief:

"I want to suggest some ways in which we may reconnect thinking about human rights and religious conviction-- even more particularly, Christian convictions about human pride and human relatedness, exactly how we belong together. Comparable points could emerge from other kinds of religious belief. I think this reconnection can be done by trying to comprehend rights against a background not of individual claims but of the question of just what is involved in shared recognition between humans. I believe that rights are a crucial way of working out just what it is for people to belong together in a society. The language gets tough only when it is divorced from that awareness of belonging and reciprocity. This is not merely to make the apparent (and somewhat tired) point about rights and duties. It is to see the world of 'rights' as anchored in routines of empathy and recognition with the other.

Religion, he says, contributes a doctrinal core to the underlying principles of universality and liberty. Whilst religion could possibly not claim a monopoly on a global understanding of human nature, it can articulate precisely why human rights were universal; that the nature of humanity developed in God's picture requires both equality and an abstracted view of rights, independent of political and social systems:

"that this terminology takes for given that there are some things that remain true about the nature or character of human beings whatever particular situations prevail and whatever any sort of particular political settlement might declare. While this is not-- as a matter of fact-- a set of convictions held distinctly by religious individuals, religious individuals will argue that they alone have a secure 'doctrinal' basis for thinking it, since they hold that every human subject is related to God independently of their relation to additional topics or to earthly political and social systems. ... eliminate this moral underpinning, and language about human rights can easily come to be either a purely aspirational matter or something that is merely suggested by authority. If it is the previous, it is difficult to see why legal systems ought to be anticipated to enshrine such recognitions. If it is the last, its force depends on the will of some actual legal authority to impose it; the authenticity of such an authority would certainly need to be set up; and there would certainly be no inbuilt assurance that the unconditionality of the rights in question would consistently be honored.

While acknowledging current tensions, Dr Williams points to examples where the religious language of human dignity has actually grown dedication to defend human rights. This, he states, can be shown from current history:

"It is not a scholastic point: in the last century, the Church in South Africa or the Democratic Republic of Germany-- to take simply two examples-- was probably the most significant context where global, non-negotiable human self-respect could be affirmed and defended. ... For rights language to lose the link with religious terminology and institutions would be for it to lose something historically essential.

Dr Williams goes on to lay out how law must not be seen as conferring abstract legal entitlements, divorced from any type of concept about human interrelatedness:

"Law does not deliver a thorough definition of the answers to such claims but develops a process for scrutinising them and a way of ending arguments by way of public decisions revealed by recognized authorities. In this sense, law is bound to be 'reactive': just what people think about themselves changes, what they think is feasible modifications, and the law has to analyze whether any specific fresh claim that defense is inadequate is a reasonable one. And this is caused by the kind of public argument that-- if we consider current and not so current history - causes significant shifts in just what we think is needed to conquer the exclusion of particular individuals from the society to which they think they belong.

He shows this with examples of the major modifications that have occurred in recent times with the progression of legal protection for various minority groups - whether religious, ethnic or sexual - from discrimination or persecution:

"The advance of regulation around the protection of ethnic minorities, not just from really certain kinds of practical discrimination but also from demeaning public speech, reflects such a reactive move: 'civic discourse and practice', the establishing moral and imaginative understanding of a society, lead us to acknowledge that specific ways of speaking and behaving habitually limit the opportunities of certain groups, implicitly along with clearly. Where it has been prevalent to utilize stereotypic words and images of others, we pertain to see that by using such words and images we are in effect treating some person or group as people we require not totally recognize as fellow-humans and fellow-citizens, individuals who do not belong in the same way that we do. And as soon as that is acknowledged, the law appropriately steps in to do just what it is there to do-- to secure acknowledgment.

Inevitably, he states, human rights show a shared recognition within communities which share a civic context:

"The fundamental point is not so much that everyone has a certain set of beneficial claims to be imposed, but that persons and minority groups of persons need to be acknowledged as belonging to the same moral and civic world as the bulk, whatever distinctions or disagreements there could be. And I wish to argue that a proper consideration of human rights has a far better opportunity of sustaining its case if it begins from the acknowledgment of a typical self-esteem or worthiness of respect among members of a community than if it assumes some extensive catalogue of claims that might be enforceable.

In his conclusion Dr Williams points to a vital function that religion plays in the human rights controversy - providing a vocabulary which finds an expression for an appropriate sense of outrage at the violation of human rights; that their denial and or breach touches on the blasphemous:

"It is this that religious doctrine supplies to the organizations and dialects of 'human rights', and it is an important contribution. It is crucial that, in an age that is commonly concurrently sentimental, utilitarian and impatient, we do not permit the terminology of rights to wander too far from its roots in an acknowledgement of the sacred.

Keywords: faith, humanity, human rights, religion,

Learn more about SpinDistribute Article Distribution System. We also offer a Pro Article Writing Service to everyone who needs premium quality well-researched articles.

SpinDistribute.com Network

Each article you submit at SpinDistribute.com is sent through our innovative Article Distribution System to our network of more than 1840 publishers - about 55% of them are high-quality article directories, 30% of them are niche blogs and 15% of them are other content-rich websites.

To achieve the best possible success we only publish your article to most related websites. This means your article will show up on approximately 640 - 880 most related websites which will give you great SEO results.

We also offer a separate Professional Article Writing Service to everyone who's looking for high quality web content and well researched unique articles.