Talk:Religious violence

I would suggest creation of two different wikis, one for "Violence Caused by Religion", and the other for "Violence Caused Against Religion".

I previously created a thread stating my opinion that this article seems to be religiously biased, and people replied that I was wrong. I do admit to failing to understand that this wiki talks both about violence caused by religion and violence caused against religion.

However, it seems as to me as if there's a tendency not only to compare these two different but related topics, but also to compare violence that has nothing to do with religion with violence caused by religion specifically to diminish the effect of violence caused by religion. Phrases used in this wiki such as "religious violence is a modern myth" or "secularism is more violent than religion" support my opinion. Secularism, according to it's own wiki page, most commonly refers to "separation of religion from civic affairs and the state".

I think creating two independent wiki for each of these two related topics might reduce the incentive for bias.

This thread was written in good faith and I do not mean to be disrespectful of anyone and please forgive me if I sounded as such. James Goner (talk) 11:49, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

We already discussed this in the discussion above. This article is generic and braodly covers violence by religion and violence done against religion because they are both the same phenomenon - committing violence based on belief systems. There are already some more specific articles on both in wikipedia such as Religious persecution in the Roman Empire and USSR anti-religious campaign (1928–1941) to name a simple example. Religion and the secular are also directly intertwined since secular views tend to be directly linked on views on religion. Both are one side of the same coin (e.g. violence against religious people in the Soviet union, Cambodia, China, etc). The quotes you mentioned ("religious violence is a modern myth" or "secularism is more violent than religion") are actually almost verbatim from academic sources by experts on the topic. But to your point on secularism, it is incredibly obvious that the overwhelming amounts of violence is secular not religious. Most wars, violence, and abuse have been about mundane matters (gangs, drugs, relationships, race, ethnicity, economics, politics, family, etc), not about divine matters. Certainly most religious people have coexisted with people of other religions for centuries and have not been prone to violence over theological matters. And since "religion" is only about 300 to 400 years old (the concept did not exist throughout most of human history - it is not found in any holy texts like the Bible or Quran - and only emerged in the 1600s and above in the European West) it is why scholars are questioning the classification of religious violence as being a modern distortion of the complexities of the past. Ramos1990 (talk) 23:22, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

There are several problems with this interpretation, and with much of the information of the page which is often cherry-picked to support a specific contention. Firstly, as to "it is incredibly obvious that the overwhelming amounts of violence is secular not religious", I would disagree. Not only is this not incredibly obvious, but it also disregards the way in which many supposedly "secular" states and governments are often built upon religious foundations, are populated almost exclusively by religious people, and use the framework of religion (even if by another name) to gain and maintain power. This is the type of complexity that is often present in the sources, but omitted from the sections that are cited or quoted in this article. Secondly, as to "Certainly most religious people have coexisted with people of other religions for centuries and have not been prone to violence over theological matters", this is far from "certain". Quite the contrary, the incredibly well detailed history of both inter- and intra-religious violence belies this. Are we to now view the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as peaceful cohabitation between religions? What of the persecution of Jews as "god-killers" by Christians? Or the persecution of the early Christians by Jews? What of sectarian violence between the Sunni and Shia since the latter half of the 7th century? I would also take issue with the idea that "religion" is only 300-400 years old, and I would be incredibly interested to see where you sourced that information. Religions have existed since the beginning of recorded history, and evidence of religion can be found in the archeological study of the earliest civilizations. Quite the contrary, it is "secularism" that has only recently emerged as a defined concept and term, and it did so to describe the movement away from the previously ubiquitous entwinement of government and religion. If a government was founded by religious people, modeled after religious hierarchies, and populated by religious citizens, how does one decide which actions they take are unequivocally "secular"? Is the violence committed in the name of Manifest Destiny (a concept that cannot exist in a purely secular worldview) to be considered secular simply because the USA is nominally a secular state? These are no unstudied concepts, they are present in many of the sources already used in this article, they have simply been left out. Perhaps due to their complexity, perhaps due to their clouding the waters of what many people view as clearly delineated concepts, perhaps due simply to confirmation bias. NonReproBlue (talk) 10:30, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

My edit on the "Palestinain-Israeli conflict" section shouldn't have been reverted

In the "Palestinian-Israeli conflict" section says "Zionist leaders sometimes used religious references as a justification for the violent treatment of Arabs in Palestine." and I feel like that seems to have a little anti-Zionist bias, I changed "Zionist leaders" to "Extremist Zionists" and to me, it sounds a little less anti-Zionist, but I tried to make it not sound pro-Zionist, does anyone else agree that that section sounds anti-Zionist?

RowanJ LP (talk) 17:07, 20 May 2022 (UTC).

Why isn’t this a protected article?

Anyway, considered the controversial nature of many topics discussed here, I’m going to nominate it for protected status. Atomic putty? Rien! (talk) (talk) 02:01, 23 June 2022 (UTC)