The Origins of Religious Violence

Nicholas F. Gier

doi:10.5771/9780739192238

Summary

Religiously motivated violence caused by the fusion of state and religion occurred in medieval Tibet and Bhutan and later in imperial Japan, but interfaith conflict also followed colonial incursions in India, Sri Lanka, and Burma. Before that time, there was a general premodern harmony among the resident religions of the latter countries, and only in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did religiously motivated violence break out. While conflict caused by Hindu fundamentalists has been serious and widespread, a combination of medieval Tibetan Buddhists and modern Sri Lankan, Japanese, and Burmese Buddhists has caused the most violence among the Asian religions. However, the Chinese Taiping Christians have the world record for the number of religious killings by one single sect. A theoretical investigation reveals that specific aspects of the Abrahamic religions—an insistence on the purity of revelation, a deity who intervenes in history, but one who still is primarily transcendent—may be primary causes of religious conflict. Only one factor—a mystical monism not favored in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—was the basis of a distinctively Japanese Buddhist call for individuals to identify totally with the emperor and to wage war on behalf of a divine ruler. The Origins of Religious Violence: An Asian Perspective uses a methodological heuristic of premodern, modern, and constructive postmodern forms of thought to analyze causes and offer solutions to religious violence.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2014
ISBN-Print: 978-0-7391-9222-1
ISBN-Online: 978-0-7391-9223-8
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 295
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgments No access
3. Introduction No access
1 From Mongols to Mughals No access Pages 1 - 24
2 Hindu Nationalism, Modernism, and Reverse Orientalism No access Pages 25 - 44
3 Premodern Harmony, Sri Lankan Buddhist Nationalism, and Violence No access Pages 45 - 66
4 Burmese Nationalisms and Religious Violence against Muslims No access Pages 67 - 96
5 Buddhism in Bhutan No access Pages 97 - 128
6 “Compassionate” Violence inTibetan Buddhism No access Pages 129 - 182
7 Buddhism and Japanese Nationalism No access Pages 183 - 200
8 Sikhism, the Seduction of Modernism, and the Question of Violence No access Pages 201 - 220
9 Religious Nationalism, Violence, and Taiping Christianity No access Pages 221 - 240
10 Hypotheses on the Reasons for Religious Violence No access Pages 241 - 256
11 Weak Belief, Overcoming the Other, and Constructive Postmodernism No access Pages 257 - 278
Selected Bibliography No access Pages 279 - 286
Index No access Pages 287 - 294
About the Author No access Pages 295 - 295