Source: newsweek.washingtonpost.com
WASHINGTON D.C., March 2010, (by Dr. Aseem Shukla): Article 18 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR), is often held up as the rationale–the green light for proselytization. That every individual “has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
The violence of conversion is very real. The religious conversion is too often a conversion to intolerance. A convert is asked to repudiate his sangha (community), reject the customs and traditions of his family passed down for generations, and refuse to attend religious ceremonies that are the very basis of daily life in much of the world. A person’s conversion begins a cascade of upheaval that tears apart families, communities and societies creating a political and demographic tinderbox that too often explodes.
Spreading hate against native religions is perhaps the most vile tactic too often employed. And even the Catholic Church, with its centuries old presence in India, has blasted the tactics of the new proselytizers plying their trade today. In our own country, consumer protection laws ensure that advertisers and retailers abide by truth-in-marketing laws. There is no parallel protection in the rabid sales in religious identity that the proselytizer markets overseas, and the consumers are the victims.
The evangelical community can only “pick on” the pluralist societies. The “Muslim world” rewards conversion away from Islam with death, and in China, Russia Burma and others, autocracy, the Orthodox Church or military junta proscribe missionary work. And so, the very democracy and openness of pluralistic societies becomes their vulnerability–a poison pill as they face the onslaught of the proselytizers. Today, the Native Americans of the U.S. and Canada, the indigenous progeny of Latin America and Mexico, the Aborigines in Australia are silent witness to lost religions and decimated traditions that fell historically to earlier iterations of these onslaughts.
It is in this spirit that many human rights activists and academics today argue for an overdue amending of the UNDHR. The Hindu American Foundation proposed in a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that Article 18 be amended.
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