Religion and the Right to Be Left Alone – Avatans Kumar:
Some of these faiths teach that spiritual experiences transcend sectarian boundaries and aren’t limited to one faith. Key Hindu beliefs illustrate this idea: Hinduism holds that many paths access one underlying Truth. The Rig Veda, Hinduism’s oldest text, concisely reflects this with the aphorism “Truth is one, but the wise call it by many names.”
At the heart of proselytizing is exclusivity. There is a belief within proselytizing traditions that their faith alone has access to spiritual experiences in this life and beyond. Such exclusivism has led to violence. Over the half-millennium following Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and the Edict of Milan in 313, Christian leaders and followers actively destroyed sites and traditions of paganism as they expanded across Europe.
One problem with Kumar’s contrast between peaceable many-paths religions and violent exclusivist religions: It doesn’t account for the persistent violence of Hindus against Muslims, especially in India. Nor does it account for most violence of people-group against people-group throughout history. I think the full evidence strongly indicates that the trigger for ethnic violence is not the religious exclusivism of one party but mere difference. It’s sad but true: to many humans, otherness is intrinsically offensive.
In any event, the history of religious violence is not relevant to Kumar’s argument, because no one is advocating coercion in religion. His key claim is that the mere attempt to persuade people to change their religion is a human-rights violation.
I have some questions about this.
- Kumar begins his essay with a reference to J.D. Vance’s hope that his wife Usha will eventually become a Christian. Does Kumar believe that the expression of such a hope should be criminalized?
- In Kumar’s preferred regime, would it be illegal to publish a book called Why Christianity Is True, or one defending the claim that there is no god but God and Mohammed is His prophet?
- Would it be illegal to make and defend such claims at Speaker’s Corner?
- For many people, their political convictions are more fundamental to their identity than any religious beliefs. Should they also be protected from persuasion? If not, why not?
- Though Kumar seems to be concerned only about members of one religion trying to convert people of another religion, according to his argument would it not also be a human-rights violation for an atheist to try to convince a religious believer to abandon that belief? Presumably the atheist bus campaign of 2008 would for Kumar be a violation of human rights, and the people who created it subject to prosecution.
