The Perils of Belief

[DiscoDancer]

From A "Point of View " BBC 4 last Friday and this morning.

The evangelical urge to make other people share our beliefs is a blight upon civilisation - and religion is by no means the sole offender, says John Gray.
John Gray is a political philosopher and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25561810

Worthy of further reading perhaps? Certainly I'll be looking for False Dawn by John Gray to go into my "bucket list" for reading.

Another piece of John Gray's philosophy on Human Rights:

Where it's deeply rooted, the practice of tolerance is a more reliable safeguard against persecution than any code of rights. The European Convention on Human Rights was incorporated into UK law only in 1998, but Britain, despite all its flaws, has a better historical record of respecting human freedom than many European states. The elaborate system of rights that was embodied in the Weimar Republic didn't stem the rise of Nazism. Human rights can't defend anyone when the state that upholds them is swept away.

 

[Space cat]

Where it's deeply rooted, the practice of tolerance is a more reliable safeguard against persecution than any code of rights.

That may or may not be true but, even if we accept the hypothesis, it's not at all obvious that tolerance is 'deeply rooted' in our species. On the contrary, history shows that we can turn very nasty very quickly. You can't legislate for tolerance, any more than you can legislate for common sense, but you can at least legislate a code of rights.

Human rights can't defend anyone when the state that upholds them is swept away.

That, unfortunately, is true.