LYNNWOOD — Religion can be an enemy or an ally of human rights.
That’s according to David E. Smith, a religious studies and philosophy expert who teaches at the University of Washington’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Smith explored the complicated dynamics that exist between rights and religion during a lecture at the Lynnwood Library last month.
Smith grew up listening to his father preaching in a fundamentalist Baptist church. But, he said, as he studied different faiths, he evolved away from a conservative Christian perspective. He now has a doctorate in religious studies and considers himself a “progressive skeptic.”
Smith examined human rights, focusing on traditional Christian and Islamic perspectives, with a small group of people in Lynnwood.
He believes the seeds of human rights were planted in religion. But those seeds were also prevented from growing.
The teachings of Christianity and Islam promote rights in some ways and contradict them in others, Smith said.
In the Bible, there’s the parable of the wheat and the weeds in which the farmer sows wheat but the enemy plants weeds. Jesus tells the farmer to let both grow because if the farmer pulls the weeds, he’ll inevitably pull up wheat too.
“It’s really a parable against religious persecution,” said Smith, of Bellevue.
But, he said, that lesson of religious liberty with believers living alongside nonbelievers seems to have gotten lost to history, particularly in Medieval Europe. Similarly in Islam, there’s a severe dichotomy between insiders and outsiders.
The political philosophy of sharia law offers Muslims little religious liberty. Converting to another faith can be punishable by death, Smith said. At the same time, the Quran contains strong affirmations of other faiths, including Christianity and Judaism.
A universal theme across all faiths is that men and women are spiritually equal but that didn’t translate into society. All of the major world religions are androcentric and are based in patriarchal culture, Smith said.
Both Christianity and Islam, he said, have certain messages that imply women are equal to men, yet also preach other messages that contradict that view.
In the Bible, Jesus treated women well much of the time. But in the Ten Commandments a man’s wife is referred to as if she is property.
Similarly, the Quran contains passages that allow a man to beat his wife if she is disobedient, yet Muhammad granted women some rights.
“Every culture has its flashes of insight,” Smith said. “But it’s not easy to make it real.”
Each religious community has faced a struggle to make its ideals a reality. Smith believes that may be the world’s greatest challenge.
“My thesis is that religion both helps and hurts,” he said. “Humans are painfully and slowly creating consensus.”
Amy Nile: 425-339-3192; anile@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @AmyNileReports.
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