RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND THE POLITICS OF FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS

Every element of politics of local, national or global development is hinged on the valuation and promotion of Fundamental Human Rights (henceforth FHRs), as it is about the formulations and implementations of public policies to promote public interests. The social and developmental consciousness becomes more political when any of these rights is deliberately violated or abused, especially with the tools of human socialization like religion. The politics of development inevitably and indispensably becomes the politics of FHRs, because all concerns of development through any established institutions are all about the valuation of the human persons and their actions. The politics of FHRs, when viable and humane, projects the level of directedness of any nation towards the improvement of human wellbeing and that of the community of persons. It also precipitates the valuation of World Religions towards the attainment of the Culture of Peace as against the Culture of War, especially associated with religious particularism, bigotry, fanaticism, isolationism and escapism; strongly embedded in the conflicts of social and ethnic interests and values. Adopting phenomenological method of analysis, the paper aims at the necessity of the World Religions to direct the politics of FHRs along the contents of the indispensable values of the Culture of Peace as a right, common to every person for the attainment of Integral Human Development (IHD), by promoting the courses of interreligious and interfaith integration, dialogue and tolerance, in order to limit or eliminate the courses of the Culture of War associated with the ever imposing relativistic, hedonistic and nihilistic consciousness of civilization and development.

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