IHEU attacks religious discrimination and violence at UN
[Subtitled video now available] In a speech to the 12th session of the Human Rights Council on 16 September, IHEU representative Roy Brown called on the Council to do more to combat violence and discrimination against religious minorities, citing the recent murders of Christians in Pakistan, Somalia and Nigeria, the still unresolved massacre of Muslims in Gujerat, and mob violence against the Muslim Uighurs in China earlier this year. He also criticized non-violent discrimination practiced in many Western countries against religious minorities. He reminded delegates that it is individuals, believers and non-believers that have human rights - not their religions or beliefs.
Here is the full text of his speech:
International Humanist and Ethical Union
UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL: 12th Session (14 Sept – 2 October 2009)
Speaker: IHEU Representative, Roy W Brown: Tuesday 15 September 2009
Agenda Item 2: Report of the High Commissioner
Discrimination based on religion or belief
Mr President,
We welcome the report by the High Commissioner and in particular her emphasis on discrimination against minorities. We regret however that she made no specific mention of discrimination based on religion or belief.
We therefore welcome the statement made on behalf of the OIC in this regard, particularly in view of reports we have seen in recent months of Muslims burning churches and of Christians being burned to death in their homes in Pakistan, with the authorities doing little or nothing to prevent it. From Somalia we hear reports of four Christians being beheaded simply for converting to Christianity; from Nigeria of a priest being beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam. From Iran we hear continuing reports of discrimination against Bahais and from Egypt against Coptic Christians.
In many OIC States non-believers and apostates face discrimination, imprisonment and even death.
But it is not only in the Islamic States that religious minorities face discrimination and violence. In India the issue of the massacre of Muslims in Gujerat remains unresolved, and we have more recent reports of churches being burned in Orissa, while in China earlier this year we saw wanton violence directed against the Muslim Uighurs.
We also see non-violent discrimination suffered by religious minorities in many Western countries through the privileges accorded to state churches, and through concordats with the Holy See which privilege the Catholic Church, leading to discrimination against non-Catholics.
Mr President, is it not time that the Council took far more seriously the issue of discrimination based on religion or belief? And is it really necessary, yet again, to remind States that it is individuals - believers and non-believers - that have human rights, not their religions or beliefs.
Thank you sir.
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Respecting individual rights not religious beliefs
Mr. Roy Brown's concluding remarks that "humans have rights and not their religions or beliefs" is most worthy of praise.
The strangle hold on people do come from the clerics, who teach religion to their followers, and unfortunately this has been with mankind for the past few thousand years. In our formative years of development everything revolved around trying to find answers to our reality and existence, and religions tried to provide these by supernatural methods.
This is ingrained behaviour, and humans are still afraid to forgo these ideas, and embrace science, methodology, rational thinking and reflections on what is mature and what is childish.
Part of our world evolved very rapidly, and over the past 150 years, great thinkers and men of science and reason have accelrated the most advanced regions of the world.
In the primitive cultures that have been metioned above, emphasis on the supernatural, on the illogical and the unknown, still prevail. this is emphasised every day, as this is the function of the clerics who make a living out of these people.
In the advanced civilizations we now have fewer clerics, and more and more scientific based psychologists, educators, personal trainers, financial advisors, etc, and this we owe to the great men of the last 150 years-Charles Darwin, Nikolai Tesla, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking. Linus Pauling etc, and this cannot be taught to primitive cultures, they have to evolve on their own, through pain and suffering, growth and setbacks. The IHEU and similar organisations that have changed many like me, have to replace these "supernatural doctrines"with more useful and practical ones.
The greatest setback comes when religions claim that scientific doctrines do not value morality, and I think that most humanists would have to maintain a very high standard of ethical behaviour and intellectual honesty to impress upon these deluded masses.
When i tell people that DNA technology is used to create vaccines, and hybridomas to create monoclonal antibodies to treat cancer and disease and these have never existed in nature and in their Gods creation, they do think I am crazy.
If we could replace religious books, and religious institutions with books from the great philosophers and scientists of our world from a young age and introduced these in schools, and also introduce to them the works of great scholars and ethicists and humanists, we will create a world never seen in human history.
This is Utopian thinking, humans are devious and as long as they can use religion to acquire wealth, drive out other humans, persecute people, close the doors of heaven on the non-believer, send others to the darkest areas of hell for not believing, and as long as there are gullible masses, we who care and speak up, will not have much of a chance.
The Golden Rule must always be maintained, and that is the rights of the individual, no matter what his beliefs are, must be respected, but to respect illogical and supernatural religious belief will defeat the purpose for which men of logic and science stand for.