ABSTRACT
In an article on “Culture, Religion, and Gender” the Israeli professor of law Frances Raday (b. 1944) takes a clear stance with regard to religion and human rights. Human rights as we know it today, she writes, “is a product of the shift from a religious to secular state culture at the time of the Enlightenment in eighteenthcentury Europe” (Raday 2003: 663). The eighteenth century was a time when the religious paradigm was replaced by secularism, communitarianism and individualism; and status by contract. According to Raday the modern concept of human rights is the child of secularism. She quotes with approval the historian Yehoshua Arieli (1916-2002) who wrote:
The vision of Raday and Arieli means there is a clash between human rights culture and classical theism as it manifests itself in the great monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And this conflict will by some be interpreted as a specification of a wider conflict, namely that between modern scientific culture and ancient religion (Menuge 2001).
