Thank you for giving me mum and dad who sailed to the most isolated island on the planet, a long long way from those puppets, before dropping sprogs.

Amen.

The other day I read a ‘humanist’ neuroscientist equating ‘religion’ with ‘natural theology’ and concluding that religion wasn’t natural… Religion will become ‘extinct’ in Aotearoa, New Zealand – you want a bet? It’s personal. Agnostic religion. It’s interesting talking to people about what they think about things rather then ask them to tick a box and expect that to provide an accurate indication of any damn thing.

Religious people will always admire and honour an authority greater than that of any state, government, society or individual. Any attempt to have religious rights named under the banner of human rights must also take into full consideration the nature of religious freedoms, ideas and ideals. This will always form the central, core, fundamental and most important position in a religious person’s worldview and lifestyle. To expect anything less would be to misunderstand and misrepresent belief, faith, religious fervour, hope, meaning and purpose etc. Or does it take a certain interpretation of what religious belief is to make it palpable and even usable in human rights discourse?

At the end of the day, any language that tries to speak of what is ideal for human beings or what the potential of human beings is will inevitably attempt to make clear the highest and the lowest forms of action. Whether that is the modern desire that all human beings should be tolerant of everyone else regardless of difference or not, what one ends up with is a discrimination (not necessarily in the entirely negative sense) about what is reaching human potential or not.

Christianity is built upon the foundation that all people fall short of what God wants; that mankind has stumbled and fallen from what it could be, and what Christians believe it will be. The Pope’s language of what is more or less authentically human may be easily misinterpreted and perhaps is also unhelpful (perhaps he should just call it “ungodly” instead), but it runs to the core of religious belief and to the heart of Christianity: any action that is against God’s will is against God’s plan for humans, and God’s plan for redemption is to make it whole again, to glorify it, and make it perfect and new.

We do the same thing in society. Murder is seen as being “inhumane” and against the order of humanity. This fits in beautifully with, in fact this is, UN / human rights / UDHR discourse. Human rights discourse has been largely birthed out of the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust, precisely because our people stopped to say, “This is not human and we cannot allow humanity to behave like this again.” How is this different from what the Pope is saying? “Inhumane” developed from what was seen as unhuman, which we now speak of in terms of cruelty and a lack of compassion towards those in need. We may use different language superficially but I wonder if the underlying meaning is different at all.

All the best

But even if he were crystal clear, and “called a spade a spade”, so to speak, Ratzinger should still be exposed for his redefinition of human rights – which for him are both subject to what he calls “religious rights” (including the alleged “right” of Roman Catholics not to have national laws allowing gay marriage or other laws opposing their so-called “religious freedom”) and involve a redefinition of what is truly “human” and what is not authentically human behaviour. Both of these moves attempt to oppose the rights of people, and do so in the guise of “human rights” discourse – a discourse which is wider than the Universal Declaration or particular national recognition of rights. The opposition to some rights on the grounds that they are “inathentically human” is particularly worrying, given that it moves debate over treatment of people to a debate over their very being or status as human – the type of rhetoric which has preceded many types of atrocities in history. Whether Ratzinger is consciously aware of these moves or not, these are dangerous reconceptions of human rights which should be identified and criticised.

I’m just not convinced there is much or any clarity about human rights and quite how they work in practice. It all seems like an excited, hopeful, but confused and unclear mess. Even the legalisation of gay marriage is left in an interesting state with the wording of the articles in the UDHR, because there is nice amount of interpretative work that needs to go into them (or at least arriving at them with an interpretative framework already in mind) to apply them to gay marriage. The specific wording is open to subjective interpretation. I would not be surprised to know that the Pope understands all of the human rights in detail and in his worldview there is no conflict. If you add in the legalisation of gay marriage, which still isn’t the case in the UK (and certainly not internationally), then this raises a problem for him. Is it possible that the Pope actually subscribes fully to human rights (in his head at least), it’s just that you think he is not allowed to undermine homosexuality in practice as it contravenes with your understanding of human rights?

If the Pope’s understanding of “family” does not include gay relationships, and the UDHR does not prescribe that gay marriage is explicitly part of human rights under the name of “family”, then what can we say about that? Is he not standing within human rights legislation? It is interesting, coming from the UK, because gay marriage does not have an equal legal standing in the UK. Civil partnerships are still not heralded as being quite “equal” to heterosexual relationships, in either law or government support. So how does this apply nationally? What am I locally allowed to interpret the UDHR as?

You also confuse my criticism of Ratzinger’s views on human rights and his duplicitous way of conveying them with a defence of human rights discourse. Yet I would not use the language of “human rights” as a matter of choice, in particular because they are tied to a naturalistic ethic to which I do not hold, and their use is not nearly so universal as is often claimed. (I do, however, support equal legal and social recognition of heterosexual and homosexual relationships.) My purpose in this article was to expose Ratzinger’s opposition to human rights, and the manner in which he uses the guise of human rights discourse to do so. A criticism of human rights discourse itself is a topic for another day.

Thank you for your comments.

Would I be right in saying that you think less of the Pope based on his expressed views of others (or perhaps more specifically the actions of others, in his eyes)? Therefore, in your eyes is the Pope somehow less than your ideal human for doing so? Or at best, could I say that the Pope is a human worthy of less respect than some for this? Would I be able, therefore, to class your article as even mildly dehumanising or at best to suggest that it is eating into the Pope’s “dignity” (Article 1)? It is not an attack on his “honour and reputation” (Article 12), is it? In fact, you don’t seem to want to hide your chance to undermine the reputation, albeit tendentiously, of all that may be deemed as ‘theology’.

Also, to what extent does your use of “dehumanisation” deny or delegitimize the Pope’s human rights to freedom of speech (Article 19) and freedom of religion (Article 18)?

I don’t necessarily criticise you for this, beyond trying to highlight the fallacy of following the UDHR, in my opinion. Human Rights: the impossible dream! I think it takes more faith to believe that human rights are possible than miracles and God. Many well-meaning people support Human Rights and I don’t suggest this is bad at all. Perhaps it is a little like what the Apostle Paul said about the Law (in a matter of words!), “no no, the law is good… Trying to follow it will kill you because you’ll never manage it!”

All the best