Spiritual Leaders on Human Rights

Humankind has developed various instruments to protect human rights and assure human dignity, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights offered by the United Nations. Pope Paul addresses the meaning of human dignity in his encyclical "Veritatis Splendor," and other religions also suggest meanings for the term. As Fingarette notes, it is our "peculiar dignity and power" that differentiates us from the beasts (Fingarette 71). He also notes that rite and ceremony, the communal elements of religion, tend to deemphasize the individual, while today we tend to stress the power of the individual. However, as many commentators show, dignity resides both in the religious community and in the individual.

Pope Paul indicates the source of human dignity when he writes of the commandment that we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves,

In this commandment we find a precise expression of the singular dignity of the human person, "the only creature that God has wanted for its own sake" (Paul section 13).

Man has dignity because he was created by God to have

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Category: Philosophy - S