RITE&REASON:The controversy within the Anglican communion over same-sex issues, considered again at the recently concluded Lambeth Conference, and concern about human rights in China in the context of the Olympic Games, throw up an awkward question.
To what extent is the promotion of human rights a western colonial exercise?
To what extent are so-called "self-evident truths" arising from the Judeo-Christian tradition - still dominant as a pattern of thinking in the West if not any more where religious practice is concerned - simply by-products of a particularly successful culture rather than being "truths" that genuinely have the universal application claimed.
You might ask the same of democracy, still so new where so many of our fellow EU countries are concerned. It remains a novel political system for most countries in eastern Europe and for such western European countries as Spain and Portugal, as well as Greece farther east.
Yet we demand that it be the political system that should operate everywhere, including in venerable cultures that are to be found throughout the Middle East and in China, a country that had an ancient civilisation of great sophistication when we still lived in mud huts.
These questions have been prompted by claims from some African Anglicans, bishops included, that acknowledgment of gay rights and of active homosexuals as clergy and bishops, as well as the blessing of same-sex relationships, are an attempt by the West to impose alien values on them.
In some of their cultures homosexuality is so far below the taboo line that it has no acknowledged existence. It is utterly, unimaginably alien. So much so that, as one African bishop recalled at the Lambeth Conference recently, when your church is referred to locally as "the gay Church" it is deeply pejorative and humiliating.
Such was that bishop's distress that it prompted an American counterpart, who approves of gay bishops, etc, to weep and apologise wholeheartedly for the distress his Episcopal church had caused their African colleagues.
It illustrated something of the meeting of hearts that occurred at Lambeth, even if there was no great meeting of minds.
It was sobering for many there to experience so vividly how one person's human right can be so painfully another's taboo. It exposed a deep cultural chasm, which is not peculiar to Anglicanism.
But reflection on the experiences of many at the Lambeth Conference in recent weeks is also to realise just how young and how fragile is the concept of the ineffable dignity of the person.
It is to be remembered how small the individual remains before history and culture.
African Anglicans, however, were on surer ground when they questioned the situation whereby their titular head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is appointed by the British government. There, indeed, they do have a point when they shout "colonialism!"
But their resorting to the Bible, and that of others of like mind in the West, when explaining their opposition to homosexuality becomes threadbare on investigation. There are seven instances where it is thought homosexuality may be being condemned biblically. None is absolutely clear and none is from Jesus.
Then there are those practices such as slavery that were never condemned in the Bible - should slavery be brought back? Or usury - the payment of interest on loans - which was. Yet, when was the last time you heard a church condemn banks?
You could go on. It means the Bible alone is not enough and must be read in the context of the revelations of the day.
Science is the medium through which that revelation speaks most clearly to this age and the study of human biology and psychology increasingly underpins the objective reality of homosexuality as a valid orientation.
This is what western Anglicans particularly have been wrestling with in recent recent decades, not least the Church of Ireland.
Its House of Bishops holds four positions on the subject. These
(i) reject homosexual practice of any kind;
(ii) have a more sympathetic attitude to homosexuality, but would not at present permit radical change;
(iii) hold that a permanent and committed same-gender relationship . . . cannot be dismissed . . . as intrinsically disordered; and
(iv) hold that the time has arrived for a change in the church's traditional position.
Clearly it is a house where there are differences, but it is not divided against itself.
• Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times.