[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are this has aroused your interest. This Reader is about another way to understand religions, some of it from a HR perspective. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
Religions build trust by inventing stories that many people believe
1. It is easiest to understand religions –where millions of people cooperate on charitable enterprises, like building hospitals (…or on waging holy wars) by the fact that millions of adherents believe in the same mythology.* (Yuval N. Harari)
*: The people receive religion and laws like coins given as change: without examining them. (Voltaire)
2. Scientists like to quote authorities in the form of references to refereed journals just as Catholics like to quote the pope’s ‘presupositions’. And so, too, do all religions. Unlike human rights (HR), they use references quoting religious texts that are always a mixture of metaphysical precepts, history, morality and mythology, largely expressed in metaphorical or poetic language. (Colin Tudge)
3. Comforting religions that guarantee salvation in the next world prevail over the unsettling religions giving priority to the needs of the poor and oppressed and their liberation in this world. This is the cruel portrait of the current world in which we live. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
When people are suffering and oppressed, the last thing they need is a God of docile love and meekness (Caribbean bishop)
—Human beings are perhaps the only animals that fail to learn. We continue to fall into two traps we thought we had overcome: a) in the name of God and b) in the name of the Nation. How many millions have died throughout history in the name of God and in the name of nation? And yet, today we are returning to precisely those ways of thinking. (Roberto Savio)
4. The crucial characteristic of people who take religion seriously, but do not claim to belong to any of the formally circumscribed religions is not ‘belief in God’ as is commonly supposed. After all, some bona fide religions dispense with the idea of God, as Buddhism does. The crucial idea behind what these people believe-in is the idea of transcendence, i.e., the idea that very simplistically states that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. Indeed, the idea of transcendence can only be grasped insofar as it can be grasped at all, intuitively. And what does it really mean to understand transcendence? In the end what we call understanding is just a story that we tell ourselves. (C. Tudge)
5. An agnostic thought here: To know if God exists, it would be necessary to understand, not only a definition of the concept and/or to gather its empirical properties, but also to have a robust theory. (Politika)
Neoliberalism has achieved in four decades what Christianity and Islam achieved in 2000 years, namely to conquer the whole world. (Max Neff) …and to look the other way on HR.
6. The Holy Church has been granting an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. The Church itself must thus worry for she is, then, not to die. Don’t you think that if now, or in the future, she could save herself by sacrificing us…? (Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo)
7. A closing thought: The exaltation of poverty is not just one of the central ideas of Christianity: it is one of the cornerstones of the faith. (David Burr et al) But let me remind you: In early Christianity, the Church Fathers condemned the private ownership of property, which, like the earth, was given by God to all human beings and not just to a few… (Juan J. Paz)
8. Finally, I attribute much of the hatred toward Christianity to the monopoly of God that so many claim to have. Well, but that seems to be common in other religions as well. (Fernando Ayala, Zavasabel)
And then there is fundamentalism,
Fundamentalism is an infection that is very difficult to cure. It is like epidemics that become endemic… (Leonardo Padura, Personas Decentes)
–Religious fundamentalism is simply rooted in social misery and a desire of an orientation in life.
9. From battles over access to abortion to intensifying the crackdowns on LGBTQ+ communities, political and cultural polarization is growing —and religion is often at the center of this controversy. Conservative religious leaders warn of a threatening ‘gender ideology’ while many secular rights advocates dismiss religion as inherently patriarchal and discriminatory. The result is a familiar stand-off: faith versus gender equality.
10. Today, some are reinterpreting religious authority, challenging discrimination and building bridges across deep ideological divides. They argue that what undermines gender equality is not religion itself but long-unchallenged patriarchal interpretations of sacred principles and traditions. Their efforts include reframing religious narratives, questioning male‑dominated leadership and reclaiming interpretative authority from the monopoly of clerics (as ancient as that of the priests of ancient Egypt).
11. But insisting on a deep connection between religion and HR comes at a cost. The threats, the harassment and the violence faced by gender and sexuality rights advocates around the world do come from religious activists. This compels HR activists to fight for gender justice and to navigate challenging pressures from multiple sides. (Marie Juul Petersen, Kaja Borchgrevink)
Bottom line
12. Where laws are adopted as an equalizer regulating customs and religious prescriptions, this equalization unfortunately often puts the legal system in the service of an already–formed–religious–or–customary–narrative. Therefore, HR defenders ought to understand that, while laws are a stronger mechanism than custom or religion, historically, laws may not always perform their regulatory function in practice. At best, the regulatory functions of religion, customs and law are intertwined in a complex way with HR. This must be navigated tactfully. (Evgeniy Karyakin)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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Postscript/marginalia
—In his 1969 Report on Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller proposed to President Richard Nixon that the solution lay in massively exporting to the subcontinent the most conservative protestant theologies (especially Neo-Pentecostal evangelism) that would effectively counter the danger of the subcontinent’s drift toward communism, whose main agent, at that time, was the liberation theology of Catholic priests and bishops spurred on by the Second Vatican Council. It was they –and not secular politicians, communists, or anti-religious leftists– who lived side by side, firsthand and on the ground, with the poor, amid poverty, discontent, and the subcontinent’s revolt against the status-quo, promising redemption in this world and not in the next. From that point on, an avalanche of protestant pastors swept across the continent. Many of them were not even conservatives. But the project was imperial in nature and worked perfectly. Protestant churches, especially evangelical ones, are scattered throughout the continent and have no qualms about turning their religious proselytizing into political proselytizing in favor of ‘our’ candidates, that is, those who serve the interests of the ruling class and U.S. imperialism –not because they are virtuous in and of themselves, but because they are the ones who defend ‘our’ family, our traditional values, and effectively ward off Satan from the Left. Religious indoctrination today is dominated by prosperity theology, namely, by the celebration of wealth as a blessing from God. The significance of this celebration lies in the fact that, through it, wealth and poverty are no longer linked by a causal relationship. The enrichment of minorities is no longer linked to the impoverishment of the vast majority. If the congregations follow the teachings of their pastors, the poor of this world will be the rich of the next… (B. de Sousa Santos)
—It is not only politics that digs out the feeling of frustration and anger of many –which explains Trump’s great success. It is also religion. Fundamentalist evangelicals now number 60 million in the United States, and their message takes up exactly the economic and social vision of the Washington Consensus. (Roberto Savio)