DOI: 10.1515/opth-2025-0060 ISSN: 2300-6579

Overcoming Religious Pluralism? Declarations of Human Rights and Superreligions in the Light of the Diverse Understandings of the Human Nature

Antoni Torzewski
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Abstract

The fact of religious pluralism constitutes a subject of reflection for many scholars and is related to a great diversity of problems ranging from questions concerning what is true when so many people and institutions accept different positions on everyday practice, e.g. when it comes to displaying one’s piety. However, one of the main problems connected to religious pluralism seems to be the constant outbursts of violence between competitive religions resulting in countless casualties on every side.

See e.g.: Armstrong, Fields of Blood .

This rage and zeal, as well as exclusivism present in various religions, is caused among others by their claim to absolute, universal and sole truth.

See e.g.: Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal , 96; Vattimo, After Christianity , 114; Marquard, Farewell to the Matters of Principle , 93.

That is why over the course of history, one can observe different intellectual attempts to somehow reconcile this variety of religions, so that – on one hand – they do not cause more suffering, and – on the other – people can agree on some basic principles they all acknowledge regardless of the specific religion they profess. Such attempts were not only e.g. the Enlightenment’s project of natural religion,

See e.g.: Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion ; Rousseau, The Social Contract ; Lessing, The Education of the Human Race ; Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason .

but – up to a certain point – also contemporary science-oriented secularism.

See e.g.: Dawkins, God Delusion ; Dennett, Breaking the Spell .

Moreover, developing the notion of human rights (understood as a kind of axioms everyone should accept) and putting the specific, formulated rights in a single document (such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), can be interpreted as such an attempt (not historically but intellectually, of course).

I am aware that the mentioned Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted as an answer to the 2nd-World-War barbarism and not to the violence of different religions. However, it contains an intellectual framework to resolve the conflict of religions – or at least it seems so, given its universality.

What can also be viewed as a means to reconcile religions by proposing a general frame of interpretation and focusing on a few main ideas are the projects of superreligions (general hermeneutical matrixes of thinking about religion)

I provide a precise definition of superreligions in the Section 2 of the paper.

construed particularly in contemporary philosophy. The aim of this paper is to reflect on human rights and superreligions in the light of the diverse understanding of the human nature present in different religious (monotheistic) traditions, as well as in the secular liberal western worldview. My considerations consist in two points: 1) human rights – an answer to religious pluralism?; 2) superreligions – characteristics and questions; supplemented with some conclusions.

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