Engaging religious laws, players and communities: Confronting religious disempowerment

This chapter explains how the human dignity of individuals is protected by law, and it describes how the religious group rights might conflict with the other individual human rights. It shows how collective rights create legal pluralism, which can be a threat to individual rights. It seems at present that either religious freedom or gender equality is the alternatives in the minds of certain supporters of the communitarian idea and of certain courts of law. Communitarianism advocates the wish to justify collective rights as being independent from the rights of individual members of the group. The chapter explains how there are divergent opinions within religious groups as to the importance of protecting individual rights in religious frameworks. The philosophy of the Enlightenment developed the concepts of tolerance and the religious freedom in the face of civil strife provoked by the beliefs’ during the wars of religion.