Intolerancia religiosa

Udo Schaefer

Religious Intolerance as a Source of Violence translated from the German by Dr. Geraldine Schuckelt

The world has not become a more peaceful place since Mahatma Gandhi, shot down by an assassin, surrendered his spirit on 30 January 1948. Violence, something as old as mankind itself, has taken on a new dimension in modern industrial societies - it has become an integral part of our lives, an ordinary, everyday, even trivial occurrence. Just as fever indicates sickness in the body, so also do the increasing tendency towards conflict and the readiness to settle conflicts by violence point to a serious malady in society. It is a society lacking orientation, in which traditional value-systems have lost their authority. It is a world characterised by nihilism and hedonism, in which fear and hopelessness are spreading - ideal conditions for the growth of individual and collective violence. In a world so overshadowed by darkness, the figure of Mahatma Gandhi with his message of non-violence, his unshakeable faith in a future world of justice, peace and harmony, is a ray of light, a sign of hope.
One of the most ancient and apparently ineradicable causes of violence is religious fanaticism. From Cain’s murder of his brother right up to the present day one can trace throughout human history a trail of blood resulting from religious persecution, religious wars, "Holy Wars" and religiously motivated acts of violence. The Enlightenment, it is true, brought about the postulation of religious freedom as a universal human right, a right now written into the Constitution of every democratic state, thus removing claims to religious truth from the domain of state power. Yet, at this very time, bloody conflicts are being conducted in the name of religion in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Sri
Lanka and Sudan. Religious fanaticism periodically flares up in riots and massacres, as in
India and Egypt, and it is not seldom to hear of