Minute with a Muslim #016 – Human Rights Framework on Human Beings & Religion

This is the idea of what a human being is in the human rights framework is the human being is only matter. It's only material. It's only things that you can touch. There's no God. There's no afterlife, there is no heaven and hell, there is no

revelation. There's no prophets anything like this.

The idea of now what's the idea behind it of what's going to happen to you after you die? As you can probably imagine, the idea is that there is no fifth thing beyond the afterlife, there is no thing beyond death, there is no afterlife, there is no heaven and hell.

Does this have consequences? On what rights you think that you're entitled to? Oh, yes, it does. Oh, yes, it does. If you don't believe in the afterlife, then this is the only shot you have.

That's why they say YOLO. You only live once, which we don't believe we say you you live twice.

You only die once.

But this is real. Because if this is the only shot that you have,

you're going to cling to life. You're going to cling to the pleasures, you're going to be sucked in by the dunya. And Allah subhanaw taala actually criticizes many of you, the Jews for this attitude. Right? He says that, if you were true, or if you are correct in your belief that you would be in heaven alone, then you should seek death. But nobody is more clinging to life except the but these people are other than these people.

And so you see how this has real consequences. Imagining that a human being the definition of a human being has nothing to do with an afterlife. It makes us all in a scarcity mindset, that I gotta get mine now. Because there's nothing coming after I die.

And the last thing we'll touch on here before coming to a new subject, is what does this understanding of the human being think about religion? If we say a human being is just physical matter, no God, no afterlife, no profits, then how can it account for religion? What's the idea of religion within the human rights frame? The idea of religion is that it is something invented by human beings. Just like your culture, just like you eat biryani, or you eat jalopy or you eat my soul, or you eat, you know, whatever, we can go down the list.

Okay, you're Muslim, and you're Hindu and you're Christian, it's just your culture.

That's the assumption and the implication of the human rights, right? We only define human beings as material creatures, that religion has to be material as well. What do we say rites and rituals and beliefs and these sorts of supposedly neutral language, we're not talking about truth and falsehood. We're not talking about right and wrong. We're not talking about good and evil was a very, you know, spiritual ways to talk about it, not secular ways, not ways that jive with human rights. And if you look into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's actually very interesting. You'll find that article 18 I believe, it supposedly guarantees the rights for people to practice their religion

freely, which sounds like a good thing. However, you scroll all the way down to the bottom, that I think the second to last article and article 31 or something like that, you'll find that they say that the right to the freedom of religion is restricted to anything the state deems necessary for public safety, public morality, or the personality of the state. That caveat that addendum that later part of it is only possible if you think that religion is just phony. If you think religion is just the outcome of human activity and culture