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Universal Declaration of Human Rights

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
Interesting thread to follow. The UDHR bears a strong resemblance to the Revealed Principle of the Baha'i Faith.
 

icehorse

......unaffiliated...... anti-dogmatist
Premium Member
I'm a huge fan of the UDHR.

Sadly, I think it's worth noting that in 1990, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57, Islamic-majority member nations, dismissed the UDHR and created an Islamic-friendly version called the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). To summarize, the CDHRI removes the pieces of the UDHR that are incompatible with political Islam, and replaces them with Sharia-friendly pieces.

Very sad.
 

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
I'm a huge fan of the UDHR.

Sadly, I think it's worth noting that in 1990, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57, Islamic-majority member nations, dismissed the UDHR and created an Islamic-friendly version called the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). To summarize, the CDHRI removes the pieces of the UDHR that are incompatible with political Islam, and replaces them with Sharia-friendly pieces.

Very sad.

Yes, ancient political and religious agendas are very sad.
 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
I'm a huge fan of the UDHR.

Sadly, I think it's worth noting that in 1990, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57, Islamic-majority member nations, dismissed the UDHR and created an Islamic-friendly version called the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). To summarize, the CDHRI removes the pieces of the UDHR that are incompatible with political Islam, and replaces them with Sharia-friendly pieces.

Very sad.
And other authoritarian people and parties have in effect done the same thing including what the current US administration is trying to do.
 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
There is one thing in that piece which stood out as important to me: "Judicial decisions and law change only when individuals “progress inwardly.”

I would take that further and assert that the UDHR itself would be automatically followed when inward progress advances to a critical point. Then the principles would be automatically lived with no need for laws to try to enforce them.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Alas, the sentiments and provisions of the UDHR are inimical to the interests of the world's movers and shakers. They undermine the profitable racism, tribalism, nationalism and militarism so necessary to the maintenance of a parasitic, aristocratic class of "economic royalists," as FDR put it.

Cf: The 1776 American Declaration of Independence, which declared:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
For a century afterward slavery continued to be an economic mainstay -- because it was profitable to a rich, business elite. It took a civil war so shake free of it -- a process still in progress 150 years later.

Idealistic declarations are fine things, but, if inconvenient to the powerful, they're mere baubles.
 
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Nicholas

Bodhicitta
Alas, the sentiments and provisions of the UDHR are inimical to the interests of the world's movers and shakers. They undermine the profitable racism, tribalism, nationalism and militarism so necessary to the maintenance of a parasitic, aristocratic class of "economic royalists," as FDR put it.

Cf: The 1776 American Declaration of Independence, which declared:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
For a century afterward slavery continued to be an economic mainstay -- because it was profitable to a rich, business elite. It took a civil war so shake free of it -- a process still in progress 150 years later.

Idealistic declarations are fine things, but, if inconvenient to the powerful, they're mere baubles.

True enough - so pity the movers & shakers. As Hudson wrote in the OP link:

"In his speech on the Dred Scott Decision on June 26, 1857, Abraham Lincoln discussed the denial of slaves’ equality and rights, and acknowledged the way in which the Declaration of Independence neither brought about perfect equality nor recognition of fundamental rights:

'[America’s framers] did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.'

The principles of the Declaration of Independence reveal the moral wrong of slavery. The Declaration did not abolish that abhorrent institution, but as abolitionist Fredrick Douglass would argue, its moral clarity contributed to slavery’s eventual destruction."
 

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
Text of updated example please; unless you mean the simplified version, which has not replaced but only supplemented the original.
The updating, not revision, is documents of the application and support of the UDHR by the United Nations Human Rights Office

OHCHR | UDHR Materials

The Document itself remains unchanged. I believe it is based on the Revealed Principles of the Baha'i Faith.
 
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shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
I doubt the UDHR had a single textual or spiritual source. Here is a link with much on the drafting process & authors:

Research Guides: Drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Drafting Committee

Nonetheless The Baha'i scriptures and principles were revealed long before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proposed nor written.The UDHR reflects these Baha'i principles of human rights.

From: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Baha'i Scriptures

  • Conclusion

    The accord between the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the key values of the Baha'i Writings is remarkable. `Abdu'l-Baha is quite forthright in the Secret of Divine Civilization about one of the reasons for this similarity, insofar as he urged Iranians to adopt the good things that European modernity had to offer, including the idea of individual rights. The Baha'i faith arose at a world-historical moment when many thinking persons in the Middle East had recognized the limitations of Muslim jurisprudence as then practiced, and of Absolutist government. But human rights thinking was not the only possible way to deal with the crisis. Other responses were possible, including reaction (going back to an imagined medieval golden age of Islam, which in practice means going back to medieval denials of human rights) and fascism (corporate solidarity in the face of alien Western values and power). Sadly, the latter two sorts of movement have gained great purchase in the Middle East recently. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Baha'is rejected the reactionary and fascist roads, unlike so many of their compatriots, embracing instead a universal vision of rights for all. They were not alone, of course. Groups such as the Young Ottomans in Istanbul, and thinkers such as Akhundzadih and Yusuf Khan in the Iranian sphere, had also begun advocating the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a remedy for the maladies of Middle Eastern states. Revolutions were fought against absolutism, in the Ottoman Empire in 1876 and in 1908, and in Iran 1905-1911, and though they did not necessarily succeed in the short term, this effervescence certainly led to the relatively democratic state of Turkey that we now have. But this acceptance of the heritage of Locke, Montesquieu and Jefferson was not a passive reception, rather, it was an active appropriation.

    In using the word "appropriation" I mean to indicate that Enlightenment ideals concerning rights were not merely imported wholesale into the Baha'i faith, but rather resonated with the religion's own historical context. The Baha'i Faith is a religion of history, and many of the similarities derive from its own history of struggle against oppression, which parallels in many ways that of eighteenth-century American Baptists, Quakers, and freethinkers as well as the French philosophes. That is, precisely because the Baha'i Faith was an innovative religious movement, it ran headlong into all the restrictions on liberty erected by the clergyman and the bureaucrat in the nineteenth-century Middle East. Baha'is were persecuted for thought crimes, and so came to value freedom of thought. They could not publish their books in the Middle East, having to resort to British Bombay, and so valued freedom of the press. They suffered from the arbitrary firmans or imperial decrees of shah and sultan, and so saw clearly the advantages of democracy and the rule of law. They were imprisoned unjustly and so championed due process. They included in their ranks many artisans, thrown out of work by the influx of European manufactures, and so became sensitive to workers' rights in the new capitalist world order.

    I have examined the values put forward in Baha'i scriptures and other authoritative texts having to do with the rights of the individual vis-à-vis the civil state. It would seem strange if I do not acknowledge that I and other critics have painted a less than rosy picture of the state of individual rights within the contemporary U.S. Baha'i community. It is not possible here to explain the dichotomy between the human rights ideals in Baha'i texts and the apparent illiberalism of many contemporary Baha'is. Little study of human rights principles has been carried out heretofore, and it may well be that most Baha'is, lacking a contextualized understanding of their own scriptures, have somehow missed the human rights implications of many passages. The Baha'i administration is relatively young, having come into its own as recently as the 1930s (and in some ways only since 1963 with the establishment of the Universal House of Justice), and perhaps has developed neither the outlook that would be necessary to shrug off occasional dissent or criticism nor the sort of irenic managerial tools that might benefit from it in resolving problems. There is room for optimism about the future. As the religion grows, it will need a more sophisticated approach to administrative issues within the community, and the human rights principles embedded in Baha'i scriptures may well influence powerfully the religion's future development.

    Finally, I would like to stress that in many ways the Baha'i texts go beyond and critique Enlightenment modernity. They do not accept, as Locke did, that private property rights are absolute, and so cannot be seen as simply "liberal" in the nineteenth-century sense. They demonstrate far more concern for the poor and workers than was typical of Liberalism. They do not accept slavery, as Locke and Jefferson did, because they conceive of rights as human rights, as universally pertaining to human beings, and not as inhering in a status such as "free" or "white." `Abdu'l-Baha supported women's right to vote years before it became part of the U.S. Constitution. And it should be remembered that British and French colonial officials often justified colonialism with reference to the greater liberty their rule would bestow, whereas Baha'u'llah and `Abdu'l-Baha critiqued European colonialism and militarism as greedy and disastrous. Finally, they posited two sources for values about human rights, human reason and inspiration, rather than only one. That is, they insisted on a spirituality lacking in the cold Enlightenment ethics, of which romantics such as Emerson also complained. In so doing, they made the conception of human rights into far more than a set of dry legal documents or a subject of discourse at conferences of international experts. They made these rights part of scripture itself. The future of such ideal documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights depends in part on the degree to which they can be adopted into international law and become binding on states. But their future also depends upon the degree to which they can become part of general human values. In this regard, their acceptance and promotion by civil society, including Non-Governmental Organizations such as the Baha'i Faith, is extremely important.

 

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
Also . . .

From: » United Nations | U.S. Baha'i Office of Public Affairs

"Since 1947, the Baha’is of the U.S./UN Office has supported the work of the United Nations and its efforts towards “the planetization of mankind.” This Office is a satellite of the U.S. Baha’i Office of Public Affairs (OPA) and thus part of the larger network of the Baha’i International Community United Nations Office—a body that represents over 180 national Baha’i affiliates and has consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

The U.S./UN Office is accredited to the United Nations Department of Public Information and collaborates with a variety of UN departments and specialized agencies. The Office addresses topics such as the UN and civil society, faith values in global affairs, and the advancement of women. It also engages the U.S. Baha’i community in UN-related campaigns and works closely with many other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at the UN on these topics. The links below provide further information on the Office’s efforts in these areas."
 

Kangaroo Feathers

Yea, it is written in the Book of Cyril...
I'm a huge fan of the UDHR.

Sadly, I think it's worth noting that in 1990, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a group of 57, Islamic-majority member nations, dismissed the UDHR and created an Islamic-friendly version called the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI). To summarize, the CDHRI removes the pieces of the UDHR that are incompatible with political Islam, and replaces them with Sharia-friendly pieces.

Very sad.
How did I know this was going to take a hard turn via subject shift for the sole purpose of taking a swipe at Muslims? I expected it earlier in the thread though.
 

Nicholas

Bodhicitta
Shunyadragon,

The key word and notion is Universal, therefore most of the UDHR 30 articles can be found in many spiritual & rational traditions long before Baha'i.
 
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