In Article 18, ”Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, could be unfolded in this way:
Having the right to think, the right to have a conscience and the right to have a religion or belief are inherent rights of every human.
These rights and their relative freedoms remain intact unless they transform into anti-rights and anti-freedoms by violating others’ rights and freedoms.
Article 30 of the UDHR emphasises that nothing in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) should be interpreted in a way that allows any individual, group, or government to use one right to undermine or deny the rights and freedoms of others. In other words, Article 30 safeguards against the misuse or abuse of human rights to harm or infringe upon the rights of others.
Thus, the right to think, the right to have a conscience and the right to have a ”religion or belief” cannot be an excuse to violate human rights.
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A human without thought, conscience, and worldview(religion or belief) cannot stay alive individually or as a group(humanity). Why is it so?
The answer to that question requires paying attention to each of them and their roles in human survival.
1. Thought concisely is the processing of extant information in a human’s mind.[1]
2. ”Conscience” is a severe and honest judge in our minds, knowing the ratio between ”my right and your right” and supervising its amount according to moral codes.
3. A worldview (a religion or an ideology) is a system of norms and beliefs the human mind demands for its RAS to function.[2]
Humans are born with the ability to think and provide ”thought”. Also, the ”conscience” starts to work when humans are born. But the ”Wise Worldview” is the result of the reasonable function of ”thought” and ”conscience” and their interaction. [3]
Achievement of the ”Wise Worldview” requests ”Wise Education”, which directs us to ”the full development of the human personality” —as Article 26 demands.
A human with a ”Wise Worldview” does not contradict all rights expressed in the UDHR. His belief and mindset not only cause him to understand those rights and show commitment to enforce them but also lead him to go further to ”animal rights” and ”plant rights”.
”Wise Worldview” is unique. Its absence causes the human mind to generate different and unnumbered worldviews that we call Unwise Worldviews. [4]
Basically, all Unwise Worldviews have problems understanding and practising human rights because they divide humans into believers and unbelievers according to their Unwise Worldviews’ norms. In the future, they will not see all humans as ”human family” members where everybody will have equal rights.
Some Unwise Worldviews are schools of fostering hatred for other humans who belong to other races, genders and beliefs.
Promoting hatred causes the solidarity between people to be shaken, and the hatred sits instead of the necessary intimacy that the UDHR formulated in ”brotherhood”.
The UDHR is a coherent text without any contradiction in its total contents. That document enjoys internal logic, and no word, sentence, paragraph, or article opposes each other.
The UDHR cannot call us to ”act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” and simultaneously claims ”everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and allows ”hatred incitement” via Unwise Worldviews(beliefs and religions).
The spread of hatred weakens solidarity between humans, and the UDHR cannot recommend, with the name of rights and freedoms, that a group of humans violate other humans’ rights.
Over time, the need for a worldview has caused humans to create plenty of beliefs and ideologies that are unscientific and, after that, unwise. They cannot provide ”True Order” and ”Preventive Justice”, which the UDHR and ”True Philosophy” render as that document’s explanatory and supportive philosophy.
The extant worldviews prevail and form our world where the violation of human rights is an everyday event.
The Unwise Worldviews impose their presence upon humans’ minds and infect them with hate. They divide humans into ”us” and ”them”. According to such division, anybody with the same belief and similar interpretation of a belief is included in ”us”; otherwise, he belongs to ”them”.As you can see, there is always a dichotomy among humans because of unwise worldviews, such as religions or ideologies.
The ”us vs. them” dichotomy, which is constructed by ideologies to distinguish between humans, is transformed into ”us” (all humans) and ”it” (death) in True Philosophy —as a dedicated school to Wisdom.
The ”us vs. them” division of ideologies causes conflicts among humans and leads to war. Still, the dichotomy of ”us” (all humans) and ”it” (death) leads to unity and cooperation among humans.
Until the hidden Wisdom in the UDHR is undiscovered, we are condemned to be trapped in false dichotomies.
Only Wisdom can cause us to accept and respect human rights faithfully and achieve the True Dichotomy: ”us” (all humans) and ”it” (death).
The UDHR shall turn its role from a superfluous honourable manifest —which is not comparable with other beliefs’ bibles— into a pivot faith and a standard for measuring the correctness of different beliefs.
In other words, the UDHR shouldn’t reduce its principles to make other worldviews consent. On the contrary, the other beliefs, ideologies, and religions shall exert reform in their doctrines, enhance them and close their views to the declaration of human rights, which is truly universal.
[1] More lengthy: Thought is the cognitive process through which a human mind analyses, synthesises, and interprets existing information, giving rise to mental representations, conclusions, and insights.
[2] The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of neurons in the brain stem. It plays a crucial role in controlling behaviour, filtering out excess information, and sending signals to the thalamus and cortex to keep us awake and alert.
[3] I describe the interaction of thought with innate morality(conscience) in Volume Three of True Philosophy: Morality, Moral & Ethics.
[4] Consider Volume Three, Morality, Moral & Ethics, to learn about forming different worldviews.