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If unchecked, it can wreak havoc on humans
We can witness how religion influences societies in many instances. For example, there are many historical cases of dominant religious factions becoming violent when a group doesn’t adhere to their religious customs and beliefs.
What are the consequences of religious deviation?
Sometimes, war, death, torture, and exploitation.
People leverage religion as an absolute justification to execute morally backed yet unethical actions toward human beings.
Schober explains the idea of how religion plays a role in communal violence in the following text:
Religion, as a phenomenon, however, has the capacity to inflame potential sites of conflict or to amplify pre-existing ones by ascribing to them transcending or ultimate significance.
Religious discourse links provocative incidents with concepts, symbols, and events that intensify and legitimate conflict in absolute terms. Incidents are taken out of context and stripped of relativizing particulars to lend greater relevance to such accounts and endow them with an aura of religious or cultural “truth.”
Religious discourse can accomplish this precisely because it engages believers in multiple realities at the same time, be they social, political, psychological, or sacred. It decontextualizes causes of conflict and lends them authoritative truths, thus precluding successfully negotiating context-based resolutions.
The difference expressed between social groups is no longer one of degree but an absolute difference that cannot be bridged. The rift is explained in terms of essentializing qualities that belong to self-evident religious truths. In that way, the inflammatory religious discourse becomes focused on absolutes: “truth,” “justice,” and “victory” (Schober 63).
Absolutes and rigidity become dangerous weaponry in propelling a religious agenda onto others, which can inevitable lead to harming human life.
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
Let’s take another example: St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
The Catholics slaughtered thousands of Protestants. Why? Ultimately, the Protestants were made out to be a threat to the Catholic faction, which led to their execution.
From the Catholic perspective, their decision to kill thousands of humans came at the behest of religious obligation tied in with the thirst for power and control, which often go hand-in-hand with religious institutions.
Religion is ultimately dangerous because if you’re not careful, you can start to justify immoral values and actions as ethical and moral when, in reality, these values and actions are extremist and harmful to those who don’t align with the standards and practices of that particular religion.
Works Cited
Buddhism, violence, and the state in Burma (Myanmar) and Sri Lanka. / Schober, Juliane. Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia: Disrupting Violence. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2006. p. 51–69.
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