Proselytism and the right to freedom from improper irreligious influence: the example of public school education

Jurisprudentially speaking, proselytism is a concept within the larger genus of the protection of religious rights and freedoms. The word lends itself to differing opinions. However, there is a popular school of thought that proselytism has to do only with influencing people to adopt a particular religion. Such an understanding relies on the view that only the religious can be insidious and bear the potential to improperly proselytise, and thus excludes the possibility of improper irreligious forms of influence. In referring to the example of public-school education, it is argued that as much as the religious has the potential for improper proselytising, irreligious teachings or expressions also run the risk of improper proselytising. Not only are irreligious beliefs in many instances diametrically opposed to religious beliefs; they are a belief in themselves and cannot be seen as necessarily harmless or without the potential to proselytise improperly. Consequently, this article introduces an equitable and accommodative understanding of proselytism, which places the potentially harmful effects of both religious and irreligious beliefs on an equal footing with each other (something befitting to plural and democratic paradigms). This article therefore also cultivates further debate on improper irreligious proselytism in religious rights and freedoms jurisprudence, a scant topic in human rights jurisprudence

Algebraically special solutions in AdS/CFT

We investigate the AdS/CFT interpretation of the class of algebraically special solutions of Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. Such solutions describe a CFT living in a 2+1 dimensional time-dependent geometry that, generically, has no isometries. The algebraically special condition implies that the expectation value of the CFT energy-momentum tensor is a local function of the boundary metric. When such a spacetime is slowly varying, the fluid/gravity approximation is valid and one can read off the values of certain higher order transport coefficients. To do this, we introduce a formalism for studying conformal, relativistic fluids in 2+1 dimensions that reduces everything to the manipulation of scalar quantities.Comment: 30 pages + appendices, 2 figures; v2: typos corrected, ref. adde

The South African Constitutional Court and the unborn

The South African Constitutional Court has not yet been confronted with having to make a finding on the status of the unborn against the background of the South African Bill of Rights. Expecting that the Constitutional Court will sometime in the future be approached in this regard, this article presents some preparatory foundational insights on what the approach of the said Court should be. In this regard, the law-making function of the judiciary and the importance of an informative and rational approach towards the protection of the unborn in the judicial process are emphasised. A more nuanced approach by the judiciary towards the status of the unborn will provide more sensitivity towards matters which overlap with the practice of religion on the one hand and the protection of the unborn on the other. Examples in this regard are conscientious objections by medical practitioners against partaking in abortions due to their religious beliefs, and the dissemination of ethical or jurisprudential knowledge of the unborn to students in secular institutions of education who, in accordance with their religious beliefs, oppose the termination of the unborn. Religious institutions which oppose abortions will also be obligated by their own tenets to form part of such a judicial process, and this is allowed for by the Constitutional Court of South Africa

Belief and legal philosophy: a conceptual framework for Christian scholarship in undergraduate legal education

Legal education in South Africa has arrived at a discursive juncture that demands clarity on what the “purpose” of legal education should be. Debate on the purpose of legal education, more specifically for the Christian law student, becomes especially important in a society dominated by positivism, mate-rialism and pragmatism. With specific reference to the under-graduate Christian law student, this article firstly explains that the purpose of legal education should include the nurturing of the student’s belief – a belief encompassing his/her foun-dational perspective(s) on reality. Secondly, in order to achieve the proper nurturing and development of the Christian law student’s belief, the importance of the teaching of legal philo-sophy is explained. In this regard, proposals are postulated pertaining to specific means by which such nurturing and development of the undergraduate Christian law student’s foundational belief can be attained

Inverse type II seesaw mechanism and its signature at the LHC and ILC

The advent of the LHC, and the proposal of building future colliders as the ILC, both programmed to explore new physics at the TeV scale, justifies the recent interest in studying all kind of seesaw mechanisms whose signature lies on such energy scale. The natural candidate for this kind of seesaw mechanism is the inverse one. The conventional inverse seesaw mechanism is implemented in an arrangement involving six new heavy neutrinos in addition to the three standard ones. In this paper we develop the inverse seesaw mechanism based on Higgs triplet model and probe its signature at the LHC and ILC. We argue that the conjoint analysis of the LHC together with the ILC may confirm the mechanism and, perhaps, infer the hierarchy of the neutrino masses.Comment: 24 pages, 22 figure

Dual consent? Donors' and recipients' views about involvement in decision-making on the use of embryos created by gamete donation in research

Background Reasonable disagreement about the role awarded to gamete donors in decision-making on the use of embryos created by gamete donation (EGDs) for research purposes emphasises the importance of considering the implementation of participatory, adaptive, and trustworthy policies and guidelines for consent procedures. However, the perspectives of gamete donors and recipients about decision-making regarding research with EGDs are still under-researched, which precludes the development of policies and guidelines informed by evidence. This study seeks to explore the views of donors and recipients about who should take part in consent processes for the use of EGDs in research. Methods From July 2017 to June 2018, 72 gamete donors and 175 recipients completed a self-report structured questionnaire at the Portuguese Public Bank of Gametes (response rate: 76%). Agreement with dual consent was defined as the belief that the use of EGDs in research should be consented by both donors and recipients. Results The majority of participants (74.6% of donors and 65.7% of recipients) were willing to donate embryos for research. Almost half of the donors (48.6%) and half of the recipients (46.9%) considered that a dual consent procedure is desirable. This view was more frequent among employed recipients (49.7%) than among non-employed (21.4%). Donors were less likely to believe that only recipients should be involved in giving consent for the use of EGDs in research (25.0% vs. 41.7% among recipients) and were more frequently favourable to the idea of exclusive donors' consent (26.4% vs. 11.4% among recipients). Conclusions Divergent views on dual consent among donors and recipients indicate the need to develop evidence-based and ethically sustainable policies and guidelines to protect well-being, autonomy and reproductive rights of both stakeholder groups. More empirical research and further theoretical normative analyses are needed to inform people-centred policy and guidelines for shared decision-making concerning the use of EGDs for research