High Court Justice, the Hon Michael Kirby, delivered a thought-provoking address on religious tolerance to an international Conference at the Sidney Myer Asian Centre at Melbourne University last Monday. Following is an edited transcript of the address. A link is provided to the full text of the address at the end of the article. Special thanks to Dr Paul O'Shea for sourcing this address and obtaining the necessary permissions for us to publish it on Catholica Australia.

"People of the Book"…

Media reports last week reported the opening in Jerusalem of a conference of a thousand conservative Anglican leaders. One of them was the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen.

The leading attendee was Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria. He was reported as saying that Anglicans who preach the inclusion of homosexuals in God's church were guilty of apostasy. He is not alone in this view. In Zimbabwe, the former Bishop of Harare, an ardent supporter of President Robert Mugabe, withdrew from the Anglican province last month saying he could not co-exist with so many gays and lesbians in the Church.

Many of us know the passage from the Old Testament book of Leviticus that declares homosexuals an "abomination". It is one of a long list of denunciations that has profoundly affected the way three great world religions have responded to sexual minorities. I am referring to the "People of the Book": Jews, Christians and Muslims. Together, they represent a huge portion of the world's population — millions of people in every continent. What they teach about morality is profoundly important for people everywhere. It influences secular laws by which most people on the planet are governed. Only in a few countries is there a strict separation of church and state.

Archbishop Akinola's talk of apostasy got me thinking about the way in which the offence of questioning or abandoning religious beliefs has played a part in the societies influenced by the three Abrahamic religions. Adherents are found in a great arc that stretches from Western Europe through the Middle East down to South Asia and Australasia.

The inerrancy of religious texts?

The source of the problem is that those who believe in the inerrancy of religious texts find it difficult, or impossible, to tolerate those who deny or doubt their truth. Especially so where the deniers and doubters were once adherents to the religious teachings proclaimed in those texts. Often the reaction against apostates is explained as being for the benefit of those affected. And it is ascribed to a command from God himself.

In Deuteronomy (13:6) there are stern warnings against enticing people into serving "other gods". The reader is told not to listen to such tempters. Nor are they to be spared. "Thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death". Death is prescribed to be by stoning (17:5).

No doubt there are some in modern Jewish society who still adhere to such views. But generally speaking, few Jews would take them seriously as a command for contemporary civilian law. It was not always so for Christians. In one of the first descriptions of traditional English law, Henry Bracton in the 1250s declared that apostates are to be burnt to death. A problem arose in the case of an unfortunate deacon who "apostatised for the sake of a Jewess". He was handed over by his bishop to lay officials to be committed to the flames. This was done without help of any parliamentary law. English common law provided for the burning of heretics and that was enough.

William Blackstone

Writing his influential Commentaries on English law in the 1770s William Blackstone described an Act of Parliament to punish apostates, being persons "educated in or making a profession of the Christian religion" who had denied it to be true or suggested that the Holy Scriptures were otherwise than divine authority. Such a person was rendered incapable of holding any office of trust and was liable to three years' imprisonment without bail. This was an advance on burning. "Christianity", declared Blackstone, was "part of the laws of England", enforceable as such. And the enforcements were often cunning. Apostates could not make a will. Their property passed on intestacy only to next of kin who had embraced Christianity or otherwise to the Crown.

Such laws have long since ceased to be observed in England. Occasionally the law of blasphemy is invoked, although only to protect an Anglican concept of God. Prince Charles has let it be known that he wants to change the Royal style and title from the one conferred by the Pope on Henry VIII of "Defender of the Faith" to "Defender of the Faiths". Any such change in the Queen's reign seems highly unlikely.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

It is 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations on the recommendation of a committee led by Eleanor Roosevelt. It gave effect to one of the Allied war aims in the Second World War upholding the right of everyone to "worship God in one's own way anywhere in the world". The Declaration is now given effect by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and in national and international statements of rights. Even the Australian Constitution, which contains no general charter of rights, contains section 116 which forbids Federal Parliament from establishing a religion or imposing on us religious observance or tests.

For most Jews and Christians today, the thought of punishing people because they abandon or deny their old religion, is unthinkable. Stoning them to death would be out of the question. The fastest growing segment answering the Australian census question on religion declares that they have "no religion". So even hard-line believers tend to skip over the passages in Deuteronomy. Much easier to single out those of Leviticus and to denounce sexual minorities.

Still, in some countries apostasy is still very much a live issue. Especially so in some Islamic countries. The Holy Koran does not prescribe compulsory adherence to Islamic beliefs. On the contrary, it states that "there is no compulsion in religion". God alone has the right to punish those who do not adhere to Islam or who turn their backs on its beliefs.

On the other hand, the Haddith, a secondary source of Islamic law, records the Prophet as saying that whoever rejects Islam must be killed. This has become a source for civilian laws and stern punishments in some Islamic countries. Occasionally, as in Sudan, those laws appear to be used as political tools for removing outspoken opposition personalities.

In Malaysia, the Constitution contains standard guarantees of freedom of religion. However, in 2007, a decision of that country's highest court, in the Lina Joy case, by majority, denied the applicant the right to record a change of her religion from Islam to Christianity on her identity papers. Such a change was necessary to allow her to marry her Christian fiancé. Inevitably, it was noticed that the two judges in the majority were Islamic and the dissenting judge was not.

One of the foremost critics of the Malaysian court decision on apostasy lives and works in Singapore. She is a Professor of Law and a nominated member of Singapore's Parliament, Dr Thio Li-ann. She is a Christian. Recently, she took a leading part in persuading the Singapore Parliament to reject proposals to repeal the old British laws against homosexuals, based on the teachings in Leviticus. For her, refusing to permit Lina Joy to have freedom of religious conscience was an abomination, notwithstanding Deuteronomy. But the abomination in Leviticus had still to be enforced. Parliament rejected the reforming measure. Like most non-Western countries in the former British Empire, Singapore maintains its criminal laws against gays.

Eleanor Roosevelt played an important role in the framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On the 60th anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt's Declaration, we need to promote tolerance and acceptance of diversity amongst all the People of the Book. For the sake of the planet and survival of the species we must embrace the universal principles of human rights. It is no accident that they were promised as a foundation stone for the New World Order created by the United Nations. Without respect for such basic rights peace and security will always be at risk.

The challenge today…

Most of the world's great religions are founded, ultimately, on simple principles of loving God and one another. It is from those principles that religious tolerance derives. Talk of the inerrancy of literal understandings of ancient holy texts is ignorant and dangerous. Western societies have mostly come to that realisation. The challenge today is to speed up the same development in developing countries. And this includes not just Islamic countries but also those influenced by fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

The Nobel Laureate and religious leader Desmond Tutu recently wrote a foreword to the life story of Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in Anglican Christianity. Tutu declared his acceptance of the authority of Scripture of the Word of God. But he has not forgotten that the Bible was used in the recent past to justify racism, slavery, the humiliation of women etc. He declares: "I could not stand by whilst people were being penalised again for something about which they could do nothing — their sexual orientation". And he said: "I am humbled and honoured to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who seek to end this egregious wrong inflicted on God's children."

That wrong goes on today. It extends even to Australia. The key to overcoming it includes thoughtful reflection that religion can provide about the purposes and meaning of life. It is out of understanding one another, despite different religions or no religion at all, that we can empathise with other people's pain. When we do so it is harder to hate. That is why religious tolerance is so important and why mindless religious fundamentalism is so explosive and dangerous.

The big challenge before us is to telescope centuries of experience, law, culture and tolerance in the West into a few decades. Unless we do so, the mixture of religious intolerance and weapons of mass destruction will be a great threat to the world and every one in it. That is why this conference in Melbourne is important — and much more relevant to the human future than that of the dissident Anglican bishops who talked to each other in Jerusalem.

LINKS: The full text of Justice Kirby's address, complete with footnotes, is available on the ABC website at:
www.abc.net.au/news/opinion/speeches/files/20080630kirby.pdf

Readers of this commentary might also be interested in the commentary from Dr Graham English that we published on Catholica Australia on Friday, 4 July 2008 which can be found HERE.

IMAGE CREDITS: The image of Justice Kirby comes from the ABC website. Click on the other images for the original sources.