Violence in Religion

Recently, the newspaper carried an article reporting on a local lecture on violence in religion. Three "experts," all Ph.D.-ers and professors of religion at USM, spoke on Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, and their respective relationships to violence.

Now, I was not able to attend the lecture personally (which may have been a good thing!), but I do want to react to the article that was written about it and to what I imagine had to be lurking just below the surface during the lecture. Obviously, I don't have any problem with someone looking at history and concluding that religion has rarely, if ever, existed without violence. One doesn't even have to look hard at history to make this determination. But that is something altogether different than saying what the newspaper article said in its opening lines: "Can religion exist without violence? Apparently not, based on the presentations of three experts."

This is the statement that I am concerned about. It is one thing to ask, "Has religion existed without violence?" And another thing to ask, "Can religion exist without violence?" The trouble comes in when we answer the latter question in the negative, as the article says the lecturers did, because the Bible clearly tells us that Christianity, for one, can and should exist without violence. DOES it exist without violence in reality? That is a different question, one that requires a more detailed response than I have time for here. But Christianity CAN and SHOULD exist without violence, that much should be clear even from a cursory reading of the New Testament.

One other statement that I am concerned about is a throw-away comment made by one of the professors that Christianity was "born of an act of incredible cruelty." I will try to take this up tomorrow.