hanuman wrote:n7axw wrote:What is not sufficiently considered is the normal role of religion in society. For thousands of years it was the primary source of legitimacy for the social contract under which people lived.
Actually when you think about it, the notion that you can have socially sanctioned religious diversity or get by without religion altogether is only a bit more than a couple hundred years old. Just how the experiment will turn out is a question on which the jury is still out. We don't know whether it will sustain itself over time.
Don
Don, religious intolerance is a peculiar quality of specifically the Abrahamic faiths. Historically, most societies around the globe have been remarkably accepting of 'foreign' religious traditions, often going as far as to incorporate aspects of those 'foreign' religions into their own belief systems. Looking at the world through a Western-centric lense can be deceptive.
Still, the Safeholdian religion had been derived from the Abrahamic traditions, so your point is well received.
Not true in so many ways that I can scarcely count them. In fact about the only faith I can think of that hasn't gone through its own period of intolerance is Buddaism. Hinduism certainly has and in at least some ways continues so today. In China Confucionism reacted poorly to Buddists invading its turf. There was a similar clash with Shinto and Buddha in Japan.
In the old Roman Empire the emperors were regarded divine and took it as an affront when Christians refused to accord them that status. People who refused to sacrifice to the gods were regaarded and persectuted as athiests. In Africa those who didn't worship the tribal gods were frequently scapegoated and offered as sacrifice to those gods.
There is a reason for all of this. Not to embrace the local gods is to break the social contract. That threatens the community as a whole. That almost always what is behind religious tolerance. Perhaps a good illustration of this is in reformation era Germany where the rule became, As goes the prince, so goes the territory (not an exact quote). The point was that religious diversity was regarded socially destructive. So Protestants in Catholic territories were often forced to convert or to move Protestant territories and vice versa.
The point is that the connection between religion and the social contract meant that intolerance toward outsiders and dissidents was inevitable.
Now it is true that the Abrahamic faiths have sometimes practiced and been subjected to a specific type of intolerance. That comes because those faiths claim an exclusive claim not only on one tribe or people, but on all people. God alone is God of the whole earth. To say that is to say that the alternatives are false.
That assertion led to the persecution of Christians in the Roman era. Had the Christians been willing to sacrifice to the Roman gods and acknowledge the emperor as divine, there would have been no trouble. They could have worshiped Christ as one god among many in the Empire. Or today, Isis destroys monuments to ancient civilizations on the basis of a fundamental reading of Islam that declares those monuments as tributes to idols.
But make no mistake about it. Intolerance has been the common property of all religion going back as long as recorded history allows us to remember.
Don
