THE TANDEM PROJECT
UNITED NATIONS, HUMAN RIGHTS,
FREEDOM OF RELIGION OR BELIEF
ALL CULTURE IS SACRED: PREP FOR
2009
Issue: All Culture is Sacred in Symbolic Affairs of People:
Preparation for Durban Review Conference
For: United Nations, Governments, Religions or Beliefs,
Academia, NGOs, Media, Civil Society
Review: The United Nations Human Rights Council Preparatory
Committee for the United Nations Durban Review Conference in 2009 met in the
First Substantive Session 21 April to
Excerpts from Escape from Evil may
add a cultural dimension to the Durban Review
Conference in April 2009. Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil:
A Division of Macmillan Publishing, 1975. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) won the
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for “The Denial of Death.” He was a distinguished social theorist and a
popular teacher of anthropology, sociology, and social psychology.
Ernest Becker: “It is very important for students of
humanity to be clear about this; culture itself is sacred,
since it is the ‘religion’ that assures in
some way the perpetuation of its members. For a
long time students of society liked to think in terms of ‘sacred’ versus
‘profane’ aspects of social life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction
with this kind of simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no
basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of
people.”
Direct Link to U.N. Preparatory
Meeting for
Escape
from Evil Excerpts begin on the third page followed by an Issue Statement
Closing the Gap -International
Standards for National and Local Applications *
Objective: Build understanding and support for
Article 18, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights –Everyone
shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion - and the
1981 UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. Encourage the United Nations,
Governments, Religions or Beliefs, Academia, NGOs, Media and Civil Society to
consider the rule of law and international human rights standards as essential
for long-term solutions to conflicts based
on religion or belief.
Challenge: In 1968 the United Nations deferred work on an
International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Religious
Intolerance, because of its apparent complexity and sensitivity. In the
twenty-first century, a dramatic increase of intolerance and discrimination on
grounds of religion or belief is motivating a worldwide search to find
solutions to these problems. This is a challenge calling for enhanced dialogue
by States and others; including consideration of an International Convention on
Freedom of Religion or Belief for protection of and accountability by all
religions or beliefs. The tensions in today’s world inspire a question such as:
Should the United Nations
adopt an International Convention on Freedom of Religion or Belief?
Response: Is it the appropriate moment to
reinitiate the drafting of a legally binding international convention on
freedom of religion or belief? Law making of this nature requires a minimum
consensus and an environment that appeals to reason rather than emotions. At
the same time we are on a learning curve as the various dimensions of the
Declaration are being explored. Many academics have produced voluminous books
on these questions but more ground has to be prepared before setting up of a UN
working group on drafting a convention. In my opinion, we should not try to
rush the elaboration of a Convention on Freedom of Religion or Belief,
especially not in times of high tensions and unpreparedness. - UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief,
Option: After forty years this may be the time,
however complex and sensitive, for the United Nations Human Rights Council to
appoint an Open-ended Working Group to draft a United Nations Convention on
Freedom of Religion or Belief. The mandate of an Open-ended Working Group ought
to assure nothing in a draft Convention will be construed as restricting or
derogating from any right defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the International Covenants on Human Rights, and the 1981 UN Declaration on the
Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion
or Belief. One writer has said; “Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than
tribalism, racism, or politics ever can…it casts the differences between people
in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.”
Concept: Separation of Religion or
Belief and State – SOROBAS. The starting point for this concept is the First
Preamble to the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights; “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable
rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice
and peace in the world. It suggests
States recalling their history, culture and constitution adopt fair and equal
human rights protection for all religions or beliefs as described in General
Comment 22 on Article 18, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
UN Human Rights Committee,
Article
18: protects theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not
to profess any religion or belief.
The terms belief and religion are to be broadly construed. Article 18 is not
limited in its application to traditional religions or to religions and beliefs
with international characteristics or practices analogous to those of
traditional religions. The Committee therefore views with concern any tendency
to discriminate against any religion or belief for any reasons, including the
fact that they are newly established, or represent religious minorities that
may be the subject of hostility by a predominant religious community. Article 18: permits restrictions to manifest a religion or
belief only if such limitations are prescribed by law and necessary to protect
public safety, order, health or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms
of others.
Dialogue & Education
Dialogue: United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki
Moon, at the Alliance of Civilizations Madrid Forum said; “Never in our
lifetime has there been a more desperate need for constructive and committed
dialogue, among individuals, among communities, among cultures, among and
between nations.” A writer in another setting has said, “The warning signs are
clear: unless we establish genuine dialogue within and among all kinds of
belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism, the
conflicts of the future will probably be even more deadly.”
Norms and standards on
human rights and freedom of religion or belief are essential as universal rules
for peaceful cooperation, respectful competition and resolution of conflicts.
International Standards on Human Rights and Freedom of Religion or Belief is a
universal platform for inclusive and in-depth dialogue within and among
nations, all religions and other beliefs.
Education:
The 1981 U.N. Declaration states; “Every child shall
enjoy the right to have access to education in the matter of religion or belief
in accordance with the wishes of his parents, and shall not be compelled to
receive teaching on religion or belief against the wishes of his parents, the
best interests of the child being the guiding principle.” The best interests of
the child must take into account the International Covenant on the Rights of
the Child (CRC). Given these parameters, early childhood education is the best
time to begin to build tolerance, understanding and respect for freedom of
religion or belief
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Direct Link U.N. Human Rights
Council web cast Preparatory Committee for the Durban Review Conference First
Substantive Session,
http://www.un.org/webcast/unhrc/archive.asp?go=080422
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Excerpts: Excerpts are presented under the Eight Articles of
the 1981 U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. They are presented prior to an Issues Statement for each Review.
3. 1 Discrimination between
human beings on grounds of religion or belief constitutes an affront to human
dignity and a disavowal of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations,
and shall be condemned as a violation of the human rights and fundamental
freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enunciated
in detail in the International Covenants on Human Rights, and as an obstacle to
friendly and peaceful relations between nations.
3.1.1: UNESCO. Article 3 of the 1981 U.N. Declaration is a reference
point for the principles of the United Nations Charter and a bridge to all
entities within the United Nations system.
4. 1 All States shall take
effective measures to prevent and eliminate discrimination on the grounds of
religion or belief in the recognition, exercise and enjoyment of human rights
and fundamental freedoms in all fields of civil, economic, political, social
and cultural life.
4.1.5: Cultural Life
*The Tandem Project has made the following excerpts
in “Escape from Evil,” Gender neutral. Where Becker uses “mankind,” neutral
phrases are used like “humanity” or “people.” It in no way detracts from the
author’s intent to refer to culture as sacred.
We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms
is the basic motive for what is most distinctive about people – namely,
religion. As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, ‘not
so much from…fear of natural death as of final destruction.’ But it is culture
itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether
it appears purely religious or not.
It is very important for students of humanity to
be clear about this: culture itself is sacred, since it is
the ‘religion’ that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. For a
long time students of society liked to think in terms of ‘sacred’ versus
‘profane’ aspects of social life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction
with this kind of simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no
basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of people.
As soon as you have symbols you have artificial
self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given
meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture
is in this sense ‘supernatural,’ and all systematizations of culture have in
the end the same goal: to raise people above nature, to assure them that in
some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things
count.
This is humanities age-old dilemma in the face of
death: it is the meaning of the thing that is of paramount importance; what a person
really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with
insignificance. People want to know that their life has somehow
counted, if not for themselves, than at least in a larger scheme of things,
that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything
once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some
way. Or, if there is to be a ‘final’ tally of the scurrying of people on earth
– a ‘judgment day’- then this trace of one’s life must enter that tally and put
on record who one was and that what one did was significant.
When Tolstoy came to face death, what he really
experienced was anxiety about the meaning of his life. As he lamented in his Confession: “What will become of my whole life…Is there any
meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”
Now we can get to the point of this brief
Introduction and see where it has all been leading. The reader has surely
already seen the rub, and objected in their own mind that the symbolic denial
of mortality is a figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood organisms,
that if persons seek to avoid evil and assure their eternal prosperity, they
are living a fantasy for which there is no scientific evidence so far.
To which I would add that this would be alright if
the fantasy were a harmless one. The fact is that self-transcendence via
culture does not give people a simple straightforward solution to the problem
of death; the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression
(as I have argued in a previous book). What people have done is to shift the
fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very
triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since people must now hold for dear
life onto the self-transcending meanings of society in which they live, onto
the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind,
a new kind of instability and anxiety are created.
And this anxiety is precisely what spills over
into the affairs of people. In seeking to avoid evil, people are responsible
for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by
exercising their digestive tracts. It is people’s ingenuity, rather than their
animal nature, that has given fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This
is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to show
exactly how this comes about, how humanities impossible hopes and desires have
heaped evil in the world.
Persons have to keep from going mad by biting off
small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some
satisfaction from. This means that their noblest passions are played out in the
narrowest and most unreflective ways, and this is what undoes them. From this
point of view the main problem for human beings has to be expressed in the
following paradox; Men and women must have a fetish
in order to survive and to have ‘normal mental health.’
But this shrinkage of vision that permits them to
survive also at the same time prevents them from having the overall
understanding they need to plan for and control the effects of their shrinkage
of experience. A paradox this bitter sends a chill through all reflective
people…Self-knowledge is the hardest human task because it risks revealing to
persons how their self-esteem was built; on the powers of others in order to
deny their own death…Life imagines its own significance and strains to justify
its beliefs. It is as though the life force itself needed illusion in order to
further itself. Logically, then, the ideal creativity for humans would strain
toward the ‘grandest illusion.
We can talk for a century about what causes human
aggression; we can try to find the springs in animal instincts, or we can try
to find them in bottled-up hatreds due to frustration or in some kind of
miscarried experiences of early years, of poor child handling and training. All
these would be true, but still trivial because men kill out of joy, in the
experience of expansive transcendence over evil. This poses an immense problem
for social theory, a problem that we have utterly failed to be clear about. If
men kill out of heroic joy, in what direction do we program improvements in
human nature? What are we going to improve if men work evil out of the impulse
to righteousness and goodness?
ISSUE STATEMENT: Dialogue to be inclusive and in-depth must be open to perspectives and points of view on
the root sources of conflict both cultural and religious that we may not agree
with. As faith-based religions have their own genesis on the causes of human
conflicts, so the Enlightenment sciences have methods of inquiry in disciplines
as diverse as literature, depth-psychology and evolutionary biology. Dialogue
to be constructive must be tolerant of differing opinions,
respectful and not defaming of
other points of view.
Addressing culture as
sacred in literature is common. Moby-Dick, the
struggle of Captain Ahab with the White Whale, known in the novel as the deity,
is illustrative of the novel as a record in symbolic imagery of an intense
inner experience. Edward E. Edinger, Jungian psychotherapist and author of Melville’s Moby-Dick, an American Nekyia, called Moby-Dick an American Faust. “Melville
pitted the powers of his own creative imagination against the ultimate mystery of human existence. Taken as a whole, Faust provides the closest parallel of all to Moby-Dick. Ishmael and Ahab are primordial images that lie deep in the
American soul. This makes the study of Moby-Dick, for
an American particularly, more than an intellectual exercise. A collision
against the impenetrable mystery of being may bring personal trauma or tragedy,
but collectively, given the image-making genius, it produces a new symbolic image to be added to the collective cultural
consciousness.”
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* Preface Closing the Gap – International Standards for National and Local
Applications, considers the question of a Convention on Freedom of
Religion or Belief followed by a Response from the Special Rapporteur on
Freedom of Religion or Belief and an Option. The Concept includes a program for
human rights-based Dialogue & Education.
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The Tandem Project: a non-profit, non-governmental
organization established in 1986 to build understanding and respect for
diversity of religion or belief, and prevent discrimination in matters relating
to freedom of religion or belief. The Tandem Project has sponsored multiple
conferences, curricula, reference materials and programs on Article 18 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – Everyone shall have the
right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion - and the 1981 United
Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and
Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief.
The Tandem Project
initiative was launched in 1986 as the result of a co-founder representing the
World Federation of United Nations Associations (WFUNA) at a 1984 United
Nations Geneva Seminar, Encouragement of
Understanding, Tolerance and Respect in Matters
Relating to Freedom of Religion or Belief, called by the UN Secretariat
on ways to implement the 1981 UN Declaration. In 1986, The Tandem Project
organized the first NGO International Conference on the 1981 UN Declaration.
The Tandem Project
Executive Director: Michael M. Roan, mroan@tandemproject.com.
Documents Attached:
Preparation for Durban Review - All Culture is Sacred in Symbolic Affairs of People
Five Experts Study on Standards between Racism and Religion
The Tandem Project is a UN NGO in
Special Consultative Status with the
Economic and Social Council of
the United Nations