How Religion Can Lead To Violence Summary

In modern day, media has showed a lot of crimes, violence, and conflicts related to religions. “How Religion Can Lead to Violence” is an article that was posted on The New York Times magazine. Its author was Gary Gutting who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. In his article, he argued that religions such as revealed religions can lead to violence. Even though his article only focus on two main religions that are Christianity and Islam, he gives some good points that can make people convinced that extreme faith may lead to violence. Gary starts his article by listing some recent attacks that relate to religion like a French priest murdered in his church and the Orlando, Nice attacks. People are told that these attacks

The first type accepts human standard of morality as their limit on how they interpret divine teaching, the other type is totally loyal to what they see as God’s revelation, even when it contradicts normal human standards. The second type thinks that false beliefs are intolerable. To support his argument, Gary gives out some historical evidences of Christianity’s intolerance toward other religions like the persecutions of Jews, crusades against Muslims, and the Thirty Years’ War. In the Middle age the Muslims are far more tolerant than Christians. But then Christians eventually embraced tolerance through a long and complex historical process. In modern word, most Christians acknowledge that religious beliefs and practice came to be expressions of personal convictions and not to be endorsed or enforced by state authority while majority of Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Malaysia maintain strong restrictions on non-Muslim beliefs and practices. A large majority of Muslims think some form of Islamic law should be the law of the land. He then used some facts to support his argument about the revealed truths of Islam that are not only a matter of personal conviction. For instance, 76 percent of Muslims in South Asia and 56 percent in the Middle East and North Africa favored executing Muslims who gave up their religion, and in 10 Muslim countries at least 40 percent favored applying Islamic law to non-Muslims. A significant minority see violence against unbelievers as a divinely ordained duty. In Gary’s conclusion, he says that Islam is not evil but it has not yet tamed as