Archive for category Religion
Religion In Ancient Greece
In ancient Greece, the society was based on religion. There are many Greek gods and you may know many of them without even realizing it. Most of the planets in our solar system are named after Greek gods. For example, Uranus is named after one of two founding gods of the world and was revered by the ancient Greeks.
Religion in ancient Greece was based on belief. And, each even had a god associated with it. That is how there were gods of love, war, sea, farming and so on and so forth. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods were physically and intellectually similar to the mortals. The ancient Greek gods were presumed to have emotions and that is why Greek mythology is filled with tales of revenge, greed, jealousy and wars among gods.
Zeus was the King of Gods and the gods fought and planned for dominance either under Zeus or against him. The ancient Greeks believed that their gods resided on Mount Olympus and the gods came into power after defeating the Titans, who were gods before the Olympian gods. Read the rest of this entry »
Does Religion Cause War?
A world without religion would certainly have no grounds for religious persecution, that’s true, but would that equate to less conflict? Personally, I don’t think so.
Firstly, let’s deal with the popular fallacy that ‘most wars are caused by religion’. This is simply untrue. An academic study on the subject of the role of religion in 73 major conflicts over the past 3,500 years concluded that 60% of wars had no religious motivation whatsoever and only 4% were viewed as truly religious wars.
Any identifiable ‘set’ to which you might belong – family, colour, creed, nation, class and a myriad of other separate allegiances – defines two basic groups: an ‘us’ group and an ‘other’ group. Our human tendency is to want to bond with the ‘us’ group and part of that bonding process involves an equivalent distancing of ourselves from the ‘other’ group. If conflict should arise between such groups, potentially escalating all the way up to warfare, that bonding alone will, in many cases, be powerful enough motivation to dictate behaviour.
There are many issues that governments choose to resolve by means of conflict and there are, undeniably, cases in which governments have sought to make use of existing social divisions, including religious divisions, in order to pursue their own agendas. As an example, consider the demonisation of the Jews in Germany during the 1930s achieved via a massive propaganda campaign following the seizing of power by the Nazi party. This was a necessary precursor to the subsequent attempt to eradicate the population in the ‘final solution’. The purpose of the campaign was to get people to view the Jews, not as human beings, but as vermin.
The holocaust was an example of what has more recently become known as ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a phrase I personally find unpalatable – but the reasons behind this attempt at genocide were basically not religious. The Jews were used as a scapegoat for the failure of the country up to and including the First World War. In the act of rebuilding the country and uniting the nation, they were identified and labelled as the ‘other’ group. The distancing of the vast majority of the population from the ‘other’ group resulted in a strengthening of allegiance with the ‘us’ group which, in this case, was the nation; and that was the desired result. Read the rest of this entry »