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Religious violence covers phenomena in which religion is either the subject or the object of violent behavior. All the religions of the world contain narratives, symbols, and metaphors of violence and war. Religious violence is violence that is motivated by, or in reaction to, religious precepts, texts, or the doctrines of a target or an attacker. It includes violence against religious institutions, people, objects, or events. Religious violence does not exclusively include acts which are committed by religious groups, instead, it includes acts which are committed against religious groups. "Violence" is a very broad concept which is difficult to define because it is used against both human and non-human objects. Furthermore, the term can denote a wide variety of experiences such as blood shedding, physical harm, forcing against personal freedom, passionate conduct or language, or emotions such as fury and passion. "Religion" is a complex modern Western concept. Though there is no scholarly consensus over what a religion is, today, religion is generally considered an abstraction which entails beliefs, doctrines, and sacred places. The link between religious belief and behavior is problematic. Decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research have all proven the falsehood of the assumption that behaviors directly follow from religious beliefs and values because people's religious ideas are fragmented, loosely connected, and context-dependent just like all other domains of culture and life. In general, religions, ethical systems, and societies rarely promote violence as an end in itself since violence is universally undesirable. At the same time, there is a universal tension between the general desire to avoid violence and the acceptance of justifiable uses of violence to prevent a "greater evil" that permeates all cultures. Religious violence, like all forms of violence, is a cultural process which is context-dependent and very complex. Oversimplifications of "religion" and "violence" often lead to misguided understandings of causes for why some people commit acts of violence and why most people never commit such acts in the first place. Violence is perpetrated for a wide variety of ideological reasons and religion is generally only one of many contributing social and political factors that can lead to unrest. Studies of supposed cases of religious violence often conclude that violence is strongly driven by ethnic animosities rather than by religious worldviews. Due to the complex nature of religion and violence and the complex relationship which exists between them, it is normally unclear if religion is a significant cause of violence. History of the concept of religion Religion is a modern Western concept. The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious things were separated from worldly things, was not used before the 1500s. Furthermore, parallel concepts are not found in many cultures and there is no equivalent term for "religion" in many languages. Scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition and others rejecting the term entirely. Others argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures. The modern concept of "religion" as an abstraction which entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines is a recent invention in the English language since such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and more prevalent colonization or globalization in the age of exploration which involved contact with numerous foreign and indigenous cultures with non-European languages. Ancient sacred texts like the Bible and the Quran did not have a concept of religion in their original languages and neither did their authors or the cultures to which they belonged. It was in the 19th century that the terms "Buddhism", "Hinduism", "Taoism", and "Confucianism" first emerged. There is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not draw clear distinctions between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. Definition of violence The term "violence" is a complicated concept which broadly carries descriptive and evaluative components which range from harming non-human objects to human self-harm. Ralph Tanner cites the definition of violence in the Oxford English Dictionary as "far beyond (the infliction of) pain and the shedding of blood." He argues that, although violence clearly encompasses injury to persons or property, it also includes "the forcible interference in personal freedom, violent or passionate conduct or language (and) finally passion or fury." Similarly, Abhijit Nayak writes: The word "violence" can be defined to extend far beyond pain and shedding blood. It carries the meaning of physical force, violent language, fury, and, more importantly, forcible interference. Terence Fretheim writes: For many people, ... only physical violence truly qualifies as violence. But, certainly, violence is more than killing people, unless one includes all those words and actions that kill people slowly. The effect of limitation to a "killing fields" perspective is the widespread neglect of many other forms of violence. We must insist that violence also refers to that which is psychologically destructive, that which demeans, damages, or depersonalizes others. In view of these considerations, violence may be defined as follows: any action, verbal or nonverbal, oral or written, physical or psychical, active or passive, public or private, individual or institutional/societal, human or divine, in whatever degree of intensity, that abuses, violates, injures, or kills. Some of the most pervasive and most dangerous forms of violence are those that are often hidden from view (against women and children, especially); just beneath the surface in many of our homes, churches, and communities is abuse enough to freeze the blood. Moreover, many forms of systemic violence often slip past our attention because they are so much a part of the infrastructure of life (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism). Relationship between religion and violence According to Steve Clarke, "currently available evidence does not allow us to determine whether religion is, or is not, a significant cause of violence." He lists multiple problems that make it impossible to establish a causal relationship such as difficulties in distinguishing motive/pretext and inability to verify if they would necessarily lead to any violent action, the lack of consensus of definitions of both violence and religion among scholars, and the inability to see if the presence of religion actually adds or subtracts from general levels of violence since no society without religion has ever existed to compare with. Charles Selengut characterizes the phrase "religion and violence" as "jarring", asserting .... Discover the Irfan A Omar Michael K Duffey popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Irfan A Omar Michael K Duffey books.