WHY RELIGIONS SOMETIMES PROMOTE HATRED, VIOLENCE, AND GENOCIDE

WHAT BELIEVERS THINK OF THEIR OWN
RELIGION COMPARED TO OTHER FAITHS

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Overview:

We have a hunch that a root cause of much of the world's religiously-motivated conflicts -- oppression, murder, mass murder, and genocide -- is to be found in religious believers' own concept of the nature of their own religion as compared to other religions. If this is true, then religious discrimination and violence may be reduced by modifying the teachings by religious leaders. Unfortunately, the cure is probably impossible to implement.

Definitions:

According to David Barrett et al, editors of the "World Christian Encyclopedia" there are 19 major world religions which are subdivided into a total of 270 large religious groups, and many more smaller ones. ₁ With such religious diversity throughout the world, there is little agreement about the meanings of basic religious terms. We use the following definitions in this web site:

For simplicity, we will use the term "God" in this essay to include a deity viewed as male, female or without gender. Since there is no generally accepted gender-free pronouns, we will refer to God as "he."

The two basic types of religions:

One way to view world religions is to divide them into two groups: "top-down" and "bottom-up" faiths:

How people view their own religion, and other religions:

Many, perhaps most, people view their own religion as the only top-down religion in the world. They believe that their God is the only deity in existence. Their God created humans and the universe, and gave humanity its only valid moral codes. Their fellow believers are often believed to be the only people who are assured of salvation and eternal life in Heaven or Paradise. Those of other faiths have no such certainty of an afterlife. Knowing that their religion is true and that other religions are in various degrees of error, it can become difficult to extend religious freedom to persons of other faiths. Some top-down believers accept the Golden Rule, but apply it mainly to fellow believers, to the exclusion of followers of other faiths.

Followers of the only top-down religion often consider all other religions to be bottom-up faiths -- ones that teach false Gods and a false moral code. These other Gods are created by humans rather than vice-versa. Their Gods may even be considered as demons. These bottom-up faiths are seen as leading their membership down a trail of destruction. They are often viewed as having a negative affect on society.

Implication of this viewpoint:

A person born in, say, Texas will very likely grow up to be a conservative Christian. They would be a firm believer in the Trinity and would fully expect to go to Heaven after they died. But if circumstances had been different -- perhaps the stork became disoriented in a storm -- and they had been born and raised in Saudi Arabia, they would almost certainly be a Muslim, believing in Allah as the sole, undivided deity, and hoping for an eternity in Paradise. If they had been born in India, they probably would have adopted Hinduism and believed in the panentheistic principle of Brahman -- that all reality is a unity. They would believe in the transmigration of the soul expect to reborn into a new body after death -- hopefully a human body. The religious beliefs that a person hold so firmly are largely an accident of birth location.

With the various religions teaching different beliefs and practices, it can be argued that only one faith teaches the truth; perhaps none do. If there are 270 major religions in the world, then -- to a first approximation -- the chances of any one religion being completely true is miniscule. Yet people tenaciously believe in the truth of their faith to the exclusion of all others.

According to the beliefs of most monotheistic religions, it should be a simple task to determine which religion is the "true" one: one simply has to ask for God's assessment during prayer. However, a small pilot study that we have conducted appears to indicate that assessing God's will may not be possible.

References used:

The following information sources were used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlinks are not necessarily still active today.

1. David B. Barrett, et al., "World Christian Encyclopedia : A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World," Oxford University Press, (2001). Read reviews or order this book