Religion and Violence
Religion is for many a tool to remove negativity from someone's life and then make it possible for the respective individual to start a moral type of living. Even with this, religion has been used as a means to encourage violence in a series of cases throughout time. A great deal of individuals claiming to be religious can actually be considered a paradox, considering that they promote peaceful behaviors while also performing acts of violence. Religion can thus be exploited depending on what a person wants, with numerous people throughout history using it with the purpose to achieve their goals rather than for actually wanting to be religious. Christianity in particular is intriguing when discussing it in the context of violence.
From the beginning of time people have been predisposed to engaging in violent acts for a series of reasons. The simple idea of difference encouraged individuals to persecute others, as the latter could not be considered part of the community that the formers had worked to build. Religion functioned as a cultural difference in influencing individuals to get actively involved in acts of violence. "In these societies, an ability and commitment to recognize, respect, engage, and negotiate difference is held to be an integrative sociopolitical force, a necessary condition for relative stability and a reservoir of potential imaginative response to the challenges of globalization, informationalism, and multiculturalism in the contemporary world." (De Vries 18)
The concept of monotheism is one of the principal elements influencing people to take on violent attitudes against others. The idea of someone else being unwilling to acknowledge the fact that there is only one God and that he should be associated with a particular religious ideology can be enough for some to persecute the respective individual. As a consequence, there have been numerous cases of people and whole communities being aggressive because of wanting to put across their religious convictions. The idea of monotheism can also be considered dangerous as a result of persuading individuals to believe that they are privileged. This sense...
Through history there have been several cases of individuals wrongly interpreting the Christian bible and performing violent acts as a result of this. These individuals used their own ideas in parallel to ones written in the Bible and came to portray violence as something that had a religious purpose.
The Crusades are probably one of the clearest examples of Christian teachings being misinterpreted and used with the purpose to achieve the goals of particular influential individuals. These events lasted roughly from 1095 to the sixteenth century and involved several waves of Western Christians attempting to slow and even end the spread of Islam across the Arab world. These people were primarily motivated by their dedication to Christianity and to monotheism. They were acquainted with the idea that many Christian and non-Muslims in general were being persecuted in Arab states. This led to them wanting to put an end to this persecution through all means available and to numerous Europeans risking or actually losing their lives in an attempt to remove the threat of Islam.
The fact that Islam had experienced rapid growth made numerous influential individuals across Europe want to emphasize the power of Christianity. Countries across the continent had seen serious progress in the first years of the second millennium and had the resources to support people wanting to fight in the Arab world. The fact that they evolved rapidly also meant that they now had to make sure their competition would not represent a threat. The Crusades were thus in many cases supported by political ideas rather than by actual religious ones. Individuals with authority practically took advantage of their position and of the fact that many Europeans were Christians and persuaded them to rise up arms against non-Christians in the East.
The idea of violence among European Christians was not a new concept, as they were accustomed to…
