Today is the anniversary of a milestone in the fight for human rights. On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are entitled. I previously mentioned the UDHR in my post on Blasphemy Day International.
In the voting for the declaration, forty-eight nations voted in favor, and none voted against. Was the vote unanimous? Not quite: There were eight countries which abstained.
Which countries decided not to cast a vote at all? Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, and Yugoslavia all abstained. Do you think the USSR, at a time when Joseph Stalin was in power, had some influence in those decisions? South Africa abstained. Do you think that the fact that apartheid was made an official policy in the general elections held just seven months earlier, in May of 1948, had something do do with their decision? Saudi Arabia abstained. Perhaps conflicts between the declaration and some concepts of Shari’ah (Islamic religious law) influenced their decision.
Take note of those abstentions. Those countries wished nothing more than to have leave to continue their own particular policies which restricted or denied basic human rights.
The fight for human rights certainly did not end with the adoption of the UDHR. It rages on still today in far too many parts of the world. Groups still inflict their particular brands of hatred and oppression on those they consider to be beneath them. Other groups plot and scheme to find ways to do the same to people not yet under their control.
The fight will never actually come to an end. Even if every man, woman, and child on our planet could be found to have been treated with dignity and respect by every other person on Earth, vigilance would still be required to ensure that those rights were never usurped again.
Pssst… It’s Okay if You Don’t Really Believe in God
Yes, I know I shouldn’t be giving away secrets like this. Your family members would probably come after me with a mob of villagers carrying torches and pitchforks if they only knew what I was about to divulge.
[Look left… Look right… Coast is clear.]
It’s okay if you don’t really believe in God.
Yes, I’m talking about the Christian God specifically at this point, but it applies just as well to any other God.
Oh, come on… Wipe that horrified look off of your face. No one is coming to haul you off to be tortured on the rack or burned at the stake. Things aren’t quite like they were five hundred years ago during the Spanish Inquisition.
Some people seem not to ‘believe’ as strongly as others. Are you one of these people? Let’s look at an everyday situation that you might encounter and see how you might react to it.
You are at work, or at school, and at Noon you go to eat lunch. You sit at a table with a young woman that you know, but don’t really spend time with away from work. During luncch she casually mentions that she recently took out an insurance policy, and that the price was pretty reasonable. What was the insurance policy for? She insured her pets’ continued care in the event that she is bodily taken into heaven in the Rapture.
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