Religious Conflict

Anti Religion

Today we have many different cultures, societies, and religions spread around the world. Most of these cultures and religion originated in the past, ancient world to us. The religions and cultures were spread through different ways by each country or religion, some used teachings and education, while others used violence and enforcement of religion. Religion in cultures and society is made important, of its effects of teaching morals, values, spirituality, and a guided path of life. At times these different believes can conflict each other, thus creating and causing secularism, intolerance, and discrimination towards other religions and cultures.

Ever since humans formed different societies and countries, conflicts of power and control have centered our politics, but then as the influence of religion grew on individuals many countries gave religious sectors power and influence over the government. This was due to religion's capture of a person's emotional character and the quest to find and follow God's way of life. As the size of population and countries grew, more information was exchanged between different societies and countries. People exchanged values, morals, norms and other factors of living. Throughout history, religions have collided and caused conflicts on disputes over beliefs, norms, and taboos. These conflicts caused intolerance of other religions and culture, thus also leading for people to persecute each other over the belief of being the right religion. Each religion has believed to be the righteous, and the one true religion of god. These believes still have a long lasting effect in our modern day lives. Throughout the world there have been many wars, many were created due to intolerance and secularism of religions and cultures. “Prejudice is the irrational, unconscious, devaluation of another for no other reason than that the 'other' is different”.(9, Ellens) Clashes between a religion and one of a different belief have caused wars between the Jews, Christians, Muslims, or any polytheistic religion. Even though most of these religions teach tolerance, acceptance, love and peace most followers ignore this, and flat out judge anyone who might be different or not in their norm of belief. In today's world we get discriminated everyday, for the choice of religion, values, morals, culture, and depending on an ethnicity of a person. “ Prejudice afflicts us in in two ways. We are all prejudice about something and that obstructs our ability to deal with the specific matters, or the persons to which it applies, in the best possible way. Moreover, we are all recipients of the damage other person's prejudice inflicts upon us”.(85, Ellens) This ideology can be passed down from parents, religion and the culture one might be associated with. These ideas are introduced to children at an early stage, in these stages children mimic or learn the things they see. Even though they do not have the ability to make a conscious choice on what to believe is right or wrong, they must accept the information and adapt to it Psychologically studies have proved children to mimic their adult figures, and after following these values, and beliefs for years and maybe even decades, a person becomes attached to the believes

During the Middle ages the Crusades took place for 200 years, one of the biggest religious wars ever. Europeans had the Catholic Church as the significant unifying aspect of life. The church dominated every aspect of society, under this rule different sects of Christianity conflicted with each other. However the sects were ignored when it came to protecting Christianity against other religions. Western Europe under the rule of the Catholic Church, attempted to retake the Jerusalem away from the Muslims. At the time, and even today Jerusalem is a religiously significant city with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. During these two hundred years many wars were fought between these three religions causing a massive killing spree to conquer the land of God. After the wars of the Crusades, Christianity started to have a renaissance and a reform of the church and its corrupt ways. Clergies began asking for a reformation, from this reformation Protestantism came through. A counter-reformation movement followed but was too late, and resulted in many ways between the Catholics and Protestants over the abuse of religion for personal benefits or for the gain of wealth and land. A conflict in the modern day world has been between the Arabs and Israelis. After the World War Two, the Jews were given the estate of land previously owned by the Palestinians. This of course angered the people living there for their land and homes to be taken away. However, this move was seen by the Muslim nations surrounding the area as a threat to the traditional values of Islam and its culture. Again this war was centered around Jerusalem, however, the Jews won the war this time. Since then there have been many territorial wars