Johann Hari has an excellent article on the worrying developments happening in the UN – a concerted attack on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Go read it.
I’ve mentioned these developments before. As Austin Dacey said at the time:
In the final analysis, it is not religions that deserve our respect. A religion is a collection of metaphysical ideas and moral ideals. Ideas are believed or disbelieved; ideals are pursued or rejected. Admiration, appreciation, perhaps, but respect? No. What deserves respect are persons. Surely, the feelings of persons–individuals believers–can be affected when their beliefs are attacked or ridiculed. These feelings are real and important. However, feelings of offense do not generate a right not to be offended.
Respect for persons does not require that we never hurt their feelings, but rather that we treat them as possessing dignity equal to our own, and therefore hold them to the same fundamental intellectual, ethical, and legal standards to which we hold ourselves, to see them as autonomous, self-legislating creatures. Therefore, respect for a person is not only consistent with criticism of a person’s beliefs; respect for a person sometimes requires criticism of his or her beliefs. Sometimes in order to respect, we must disagree. Anything less is not respect, but indifference.
Johann Hari distills this down to:
When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.
Quite.
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