Restoring Intimacy: Christian-Buddhist resources toward solidarity (original) (raw)
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Intra- and inter-Religious Hate and Violence: A Psychosocial Model
Journal of Hate Studies, 2003
Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion-several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.-Mark Twain Hatred, discrimination, and violence in the name of religion are certainly not new phenomena, but rather date back through the historical record. The persecution of early Christians by the Romans and of Jews/Muslims during the Crusades are but two examples from history. Today, terrorist attacks in Israel, violence in Northern Ireland, ethnic conflict and genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and a host of other headlines remind us regularly that hatred and violence under the flag of religion still exist. However, for most individuals in the United States prior to September 11th, 2001, such violence was thought to occur primarily elsewhere on the distant horizon of international affairs. Freedom of religion and religious tolerance are viewed by most in the U.S. as fundamental tenets of our society. Furthermore, any religious hatred and intolerance that exist in the U.S. are thought to occur only on the domestic fringe and are thus not major threats to the vast majority of Americans. Consequently, the attacks of September 11, given the belief that the attacks were grounded in Islamic fundamentalism as part of a Holy War, have raised questions for many about the foundation of religious hatred and violence. Unfortunately, most of the discussion of religious hatred in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks has focused on the specifics of Islam. Religious responses from various theological perspectives have occurred along a continuum of dialogue. At one end of the spectrum, many theologians have stressed the beauty and peace-abiding nature of the Islamic faith. At the other end, wellknown Christian evangelists have offered harsher opinions. For example, Franklin Graham, son of the Reverend Billy Graham, stated that he believed Islam to be a "very evil and wicked religion," 1 and Jerry Falwell called Mohammed a "terrorist." 2 While both have subsequently qualified their remarks, such comments exemplify a reciprocal foundation of religious intolerance that argues against a purely theological root for religious hatred, terrorism, and violence. While theological rationales for the fomentation of intra-religious hatred 5 \\server05\productn\G\GHS\2-1\GHS106.txt unknown Seq: 2 8-AUG-03 12:24
The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History
International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2011
Reviewed by Joshua Sinai Politically motivated violence by religious fundamentalist militants around the world is a serious security threat facing our democratic societies. In America, the "suspected" perpetrators of recent terrorist plots and attacks, such as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Najibullah Zazi in the New York City subway bomb plot, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of the aborted airline bombing, and Faisal Shahzad of the failed Times Square bomb, are recent examples of a turn to violence by religious fundamentalist extremists. Our allies in places such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen face threats and violence from such militants practically on a daily basis. At the same time, virtually all of today's major religions, whether Christianity, Hinduism, Islam or Judaism, are being threatened by extremist minorities of varying sizes that seek with violence to impose their fundamentalist interpretations over mainstream theologies and practices.
Why does Religion Turn Violent?: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Religious Terrorism
The Psychoanalytic Review, 2006
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THE RELIGIOUS FUNCTION IN CHANGING TIME: HOSTILITY TOWARD RELIGIONS AND INTEGRATION OF THE OTHER
Who is the other one? And what sets us apart from every individual or population detected different from us ? Today as yesterday, today maybe more than yesterday, the conflicts that brutalises peoples of the world, show their nonsense hear the words of Nathan the Jew, that everyone, everyone, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Christians, must remember in a deep thought about tolerance and the absurdity of all claim of universality of all religion. (L. Puggelli 2010, in Ex Oriente Lux studi su Nathan il Saggio di G.E. Lessing). The post-Enlightenment critique of religion has repeatedly maintained that religion is a cause of violence and in this way, it has fueled hostility towards religions. The aim of my paper is trying to demonstrate, using Jungian theorization, the importance of retaining, regaining or creating ex-novo a functional relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, a functional Ego-Self axis, recovering a religious function that is different from religions and that is particularly important in an age of crisis like the present one, where the domination of rationalistic and hedonistic aspects estrange us from our inner center, and this is an ethic task. This is the way to welcome the other like a brother: “[the men] can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, individuals with whom he has a chance to compare, and from whom he is able to discriminate himself.” (C.G. Jung).
Hate Studies: The Urgency and Its Developments in the Perspective of Religious Studies
2021
This article is a descriptive study of hate. The phenomenon of hatred has prompted many researchers to find out more about hatred, the effects of hatred, and hate management. This research revealed that hatred had become a separate field of study, called the Hate Study, initiated and organized by the Gonzaga University Institute for Hate Studies, in 1997. Hate Studies became an international interdisciplinary field that united scholars, academic researchers, practitioners, human rights activists, policy makers, NGO leaders, and others. This study collects research results from various academic fields, both in the fields of humanities, social sciences, education, politics, economics, and the like so as to produce scientific discussions and practical applications in the academic, legal and policy settings, and counter-hate practices in community organizations civil. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the urgency of multidisciplinary religious studies disciplinary participation...
Review: The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence and History
Religion, 2011
This slim volume is a surprising publication, not so much in the contents (Pascal Boyer's contributions to the Cognitive Science of Religion being well known), as in the context it stems from: a series of talks given in Germany in 2008 as the 'Templeton Research Lectures'. This is an interesting occurrence, as anyone familiar with Pascal Boyer's previous work will know. The Templeton Foundation seeks to further the so-called 'Constructive Engagement of Science and Religion', and Boyer certainly does not do that, as this volume amply demonstrates. Boyer says in an introductory 'cautionary note' that the lectures were 'delivered in the form of sermons' with very little on how the Cognitive Science of Religion has come to know what it does (p. 5). Instead, he takes current results and explores some questions that ensue: 'Can there be a free civil society with religions? Does it make sense to talk about religious experience? Do religions make people better? I encourage readers who find some of these statements odd or implausible (and the study of religion is replete with surprises) to have a look at the studies mentioned in the notes' (p. 5). For the reader not familiar with Pascal Boyer's truly groundbreaking work, this text is a good place to start. Boyer was given the opportunity to present the insights from his work to a different audience and his suggestions are as provocative as ever. He takes on some of the usual (if not trivial) conjectures about religion and twists them, turns them upside down or downright disposes of them on the heap of conceptual rubbish of yore. The title alone indicated this; where Sigmund Freud talked about religion in the 'Future of an Illusion', Boyer is more radical in 'The Fracture of an Illusion'a fracture that may (or must) even lead to 'The Dissolution of Religion'. His arguments are presented in five relatively short chapters that deal with questions such as: 'Is there such a thing as religion?', 'What is natural in religions?', 'Do religions make people better?', and 'Is there a religious experience?' The final chapter bears the title: 'Are religions against reason and freedom?' Here, Boyer is clearly a normatively concerned intellectual, as well as a brilliant scientist. He was originally trained as an anthropologist, and he remains true to the maxim of Edward Burnett Tylor that Anthropology is not only the science of culture but also a 'reformer's science'. So, Boyer is apologeticbut against religion and for reason, freedom, and science, so here he seizes the occasion to propagate an instantly recognizable French intellectual tradition. In the book, he does not want to make the case that religious ideas are created by human minds because this
« On the ‘‘psycho-theological’’ structure of modernity and social violence. » In this talk, I want to highlight three fundamental metaphysical dimensions of contemporary Western societies, through the prism of religious phenomenon and social violence. I describe a) the sectarian structure of Western societies, where visible ethical virtuosity allows the social control of citizens in relation to each other; b) the dimension I call 'mystical' of these societies, where the internalisation of the divine makes the internalisation of social norms possible; c) the deployment of 'managerial subjectivity', based on the two previous dimensions, where social control and the internalisation of the divine make possible a very strong violence in which the individual can, from one day to the next, find himself excluded from the community We will think of these three dimensions by means of 'psycho-theological' concepts, i.e. describing how the modern accentuation of the transcendence of the divine has produced very concrete and violent psychological and social effects (what we call a process of 'immatranscendence'). The works of Max Weber, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin will help us to enter into such a questioning.
APSA An Integrated Theory of the Political Psychology of Religious Violence
The literature on political mass violence is enormous. It grew out of research on the rise of fascism and the holocaust of the 1930s and 40s. A more specialized literature focusing on religiously motivated mass violence emerged in the 1980s and 90s with the rise of suicide bombings throughout the Middle East, the suicide attack in Lebanon in 1983 which killed 241 U.S. military personnel, and the attacks on other U.S. military targets. This literature intensified with incidents of 21 st century violence, which includes the 9-11 tragedy, the rise of al Qaeda and ISIS, and the recent incidents of domestic terrorist attacks inside the U.S., the U.K., France Belgium or other countries. This literature has been inconsistent and contradictory. Whereas it is impossible to cover this entire literature in a single paper, I attempt to review select themes in this literature, resolve some of the inconsistencies, identify useful and dubious themes, separate the wheat from the chaff, and develop a simplified integrated theory. However, I rely heavily on the works of Erich Fromm, as he has provided the most comprehensive and developed integrated theory of religious-political violence. I integrate several themes that I find useful in understanding this violence. I provide several select profiles of terrorists to illustrate this theory.