My religion and all of the ones you mention forbid coersion of any kind in getting people to "believe" in anything. I have seen people come to a religion or change religions but their accounting is ussually the one that they now came to accept, more closely matches what they believe in their heart, than say the religion of their father. If you think about it (and I am sure you have) the two concepts "coersion" and "belief" are incompatable. Similarly, the terms "belief" and "convert" are not a perfect match.
I agree that they initially are different. There is a well known effect where victims develop sympathy with their captors. I believe that in the case of Arab terrorists, as an example, that if you are desperately poor, your religion represses you and you have little hope for a good material life in the present, that religious extremism can motivate these otherwise good people to do things that are not in their immediate interest (or mine!) This would be difficult to do to me because I don't believe in a hereafter as an absolute probability.
However, I'm not sure if I traded places with some poor gay Arab man whose religion didn't allow him to express himself physically, that I couldn't be persuaded to go to heaven and indulge myself there. From what I've read (I could be misinformed) homosexuality is only a sin on Earth and that once you rise to Heaven no desire is sinful.
This philosophical view, if held tightly, could alter one's value system in the material world significantly. I don't think Bosnians are violent by nature, I think it is their circumstances and tradition (for lack of a better term). It is simply the way things were done and continue to be done. The only solution that would work is to forcibly expatriate everyone there and widely separate them for many generations. After that, you could move somebody else in who doesn't have the baggage and gradually reintroduce the indigenous people. The chances of this happening are zero and it would be perceived as being paternalistic. The only organization with the moral authority to do this would be a multilateral group led maybe by the UN. In the Bosnian case, religion is probably only acting as a facilitating agent and not a proximal cause.
In the U.S., the Hatfield and McCoys' feud lasted for generations. I read an article last year about how the families have now joined forces and are creating something like a theme park to exploit the history of former bloodshed. These things can take care of themselves.
I don't attribute violence to people as much as I do circumstances and systems of thought. People with systems of thought that allow themselves to distinguish themselves as being more worthy of God's love than others allows them to do really horrible things in the material world which we all share.
On PBS, they had an interview with the Fundamentalist Jews in Israel. These guys are as bad as any Nazi in their rhetoric, IMO. Am I to accept this from them because other Jews were persecuted in WWII? I don't think so. |
