Why is there so much violence based on religious differences?
I’ve been thinking, for all of the mainstream world religions I can think of, they teach peace. Or, at least, they don’t advocate violence. Certainly there are fundamentalist or extremists everywhere in all religions that do resort to violence, but as far as I’ve studied and experienced, violence is not condoned by the mainstream of any major religion. So why do you think it spurs so much hatred?
For a certain variety of person, explicit beliefs are core to their self-identity. To challenge those beliefs–as they perceive them–is to question the quality of their lives and their judgment, so any contrary belief is seen as not merely the choice of another person, such as preferring chocolate to vanilla, but a denial of the value of one’s own being. This is pretty threatening to many people who often translate those issues into action.
On a larger scale, the same phenomenon repeats on the social level. To choose a contrary philosophical postion on such a central issue of identity is perceived as an attack on the very foundation of that identity, making it easier to rally troops to go forth and defend (as they see it) the identifying belief(s).
Because religion is another category on which people divide humanity into “us” and “them”. And having an “us” and a “them” is a prerequisite for any group violence. Some religions don’t help the matter by having some fairly nasty things to say about outsiders, either (the Jewish Bible/Christian Old Testament is particularly bad in this regard).
Religion is something about which a lot of people feel strongly. For the most part, people don’t fight over something about which they don’t feel strongly.
I’ll add that a religion is vulnerable to its members (your children!) being converted away if another relgion gains cultural primacy in a society. Also, if moral values such as “thou shalt not kill” are part of your relgion, then members of another religion can’t be trusted to have the same values–so they might kill you and think nothing of it.
Any question about “so much violence” implies a *measure * of violence. So, *how much * violence is there overall, and *how much * of it is based on religious differences? And, are “religious differences” a *cause * of violence?
It seems that violence is the result of multiple causes in various combinations.
So, it seems to me that a question to ask first is: “Why is there violence?”, and then, perhaps, to ask “Why has religion done relatively little to reduce the amount of violence?”?
Are you talking about today or throughout history? Clearly some religions have advocated violence in the past:
Many of the Jewish commandments advocated stoning and killing, and the Israelites are portrayed as killing (with God’s help) hundreds of thousands of “non-believers”.
Jesus is quoted as saying: “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.”
And, in the Qur’an: “But when the forbidden months are past then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them and seize them beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).”.
Well, hatred is different from violence but I suppose that it often leads to violence. In any case, how much hatred is “so much”, and how much hatred would be “just right”?
As few reasons come to mind.
First, whether most religions actually preach peace depends on how selectively you read their holy books, as Alwrong points out.
Second, religion tends to override everything else, the more religious people are. Including morality and compassion. To a true believer, his/her religion is simply more important than your life; it’s more important than ANYTHING else.
Third, being religious in the first place means the person has poor judgement, which naturally leads to poor behavior.
Fourth, the authoritarian pseudomorality of religion, that bases behavior on what God or Allah or the local priest says is naturally amenable to distortion, since it’s not based on what you do to people, but what your god wants.
Fifth, belief in an afterlife naturally makes killing and compassion less important. We see that attitude on this very board; people arguing that suffering and death in the real world, right now, isn’t important because of the hypothetical afterlife.
This is nothing but a pointless jab at believers, and false to boot. A person can easily be raised into religion and therefore be operating rationally based on an established base of poor assumptions. So long as their environment or their studies never call the credibility of their religious assumptions into question, there is no rational reason why a person of good judgment should abandon their beliefs. Comparing it to a logical argument, if you start with faulty premises, you can reach a faulty conclusion even if your logic is perfect.
(Also I dispute the assumption that poor judgment “naturally” leads to poor behavior. “Poor” (uncertain) judgment need not lead to “poor” (evil) behavior; it can alternately lead to mistakes of an innocent or self-inconveniencing nature, or even mere inaction. So both halves of the insulting assertion fall apart.)
The other four points made seem essentially correct, though.
Most very good points so far (I look forward to more posts from Alwrong). I will also add the publicity factor. Imagine judging the US based on the VA Tech killings, a nation of loons and sheep on the slaughterhouse!. Or any other group based on their most extreme cases. Nobody would come out looking good.
Of course, the media need the attention grabbing headlines and focus on those very extremes. So Iraq is Saddam, Korea is Kim Jong, Gernamy is Hitler, sportsmens are Dennis Rodman, blacks OJ Simpson, you name the group, they have some destructive loser that hogs the headlines.
I bet religious violence would look different once you put it in terms of percentages and you factor out other socioeconomic variables.
surprised?
I think the real question to ask is why religion spurs so little hatred. Given how much slaughter was committed by atheists in the 20th century, no one can deny that human beings have unlimited capacity for cruelty and violence. Obviously it can only have been religion that kept most of that capacity bottled up until the 20th century and continues to keep it bottled up in most parts of the world today.
Poor judgement is poor judgement, whether it’s due to a defective brain or bad data.
I said “naturally”, not certainly. There are far more ways to go wrong than right, and a person operating with bad judgement is only going to choose the right path by luck, and lots of it. As the saying goes, a bad plan it worse than no plan at all; the bad plan will guide you away from the correct choices.
Except that the motivation for those killings wasn’t atheism, but Communism, and Communism is simply just another religion ( or a close cousin ) doing what evangelical religions tend to do, given the chance. Killing the competition.
We don’t know that that’s true. We have seen that it has caused violence in some cases – sometimes terrible violence. But we have no way of knowing how many times people refrained from selfish and hateful acts because of their religious faith and the desire to live a more holy life.
Quoting that passage to prove that Jesus didn’t teach peace doesn’t work. The question is then: Were there other passages in which he did encourage peace? And, of course, there are. I’m sure you know them. I’m not the one to explain the contradictions.
I think it’s a multi-faceted thing.
There is a certain group of people in any society who are inclined to be zealous. They want to find an ideology and nestle there. I’m thinking along the lines of certain anti-abortion crusaders in the US - nominally Christian, but with very definite zealot tendencies, like Eric Rudolph. Or possibly like the very activist kibbutz residents in Israel. Or the very extremist anti-Israel Palestinians. If their conflict were taken away, what would they have? The conflict defines them, because that’s what they have; religion is only the framework.
And when that ideology spreads outside the original zealots, it picks up the economic and social factors of the surrounding society. The Crusades probably would never have happened without a large base of second sons in Europe who had no chance of inheriting their fathers’ lands - so a monk gets up and says, “Let’s conquer this land for Christ!” and all these restless guys get up and head to the Levant. Because, hey, they’ve got no prospects at home - maybe they can get rich there. Their desire for land and power now has a morally acceptable framework.
And then progress happens. People start thinking a little more about what it means to live with their fellows. And the zealot people can’t stand it, and conflicts happen because the less-dedicated people, who used religion as an excuse for their own gain, start to actually interact with people around them.
I have no idea where I’m going with this, but I’ve thought about it a lot.
I would personally vote that “religious violence” in general has very little to do with religion.
At heart, people kill other people:
Religion just helps to create a stronger Us and a Them, which gives you a target. Bending the teachings or speaking in the name of the deities can also help those in charge to convince the people that something is justified and that something needs to be done.
Minus religion, people will still find reasons to kill each other. Just, like I said, it has provided a good demarcation line through history.
Random religious violence mostly falls under item #3, these days. In the past though, it was probably mostly #s 1 and 2. The first Crusade would be an example of the 1st, the Holocaust would probably be an example of both 2 and 3, etc.
I didn’t say that I know that it is true, i.e. that “religion has done relatively little to reduce the amount of violence”.
This is what I said:
I didn’t quote Matthew 10:34-36 (which quotes Micah 7:6) to “prove” anything, so I guess that’s why it doesn’t “work”.
Soory, I didn’t address this:
Although we don’t “how many times”, I’m sure that the number of times is much greater than one.
Of course! 
Sorry … I haven’t paid my membership yet, so that I can edit.
Then please clarify your comments then, please.
From my reading, it certainly appears (given the OP) that you are implying that Jesus was advocating violence. (or the threat of it).
What was your point?
That’s a common claim, but I think it’s jumping the gun. One can point out (rightfuly so), that great deals of violence exist despit religion; however, this does not mean that religion has done little to temper that violence. Indeed, as has been pointed out many times before, the greatest amounts of violence have occurred in societies where religion was outlawed or otherwise repressed.
I’m saying that the particular passage of Matthew could be interpreted as implying that Jesus was advocating violence, in contrast to the OP that says:
How do you interpret Matthew 10:34?