Of course, what’s a
system of rewards---eternal happiness, meeting up with departed friends and
family, singing hymns and playing harps ad nauseum, 72 virgins, and so on without a corresponding
systems of punishments---a lake of fire, the smell of sulfur, eternal torment by demons and pitchforks, endless
reruns of “I Love Lucy”, those hymns and harps ad nauseum again, and having to put up with 72 virgins?
It’s always about rewards and punishments. The stick and carrot (or apple I suppose in this case). Countless institutions and individuals have made a pretty good living as this. The Vatican for instance, is one of the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet. They’ve amassed a level of wealth that would have Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Exxon, and Google look like paupers. Most estimates put its wealth at around $10 to $15 billion dollars, plus they pay no---zero---taxes on that wealth, not to mention priceless artifacts and documents. For centuries it’s also been the great keeper of secrets.
This has ranged for the ordinary peasant confessing his or
her lust for the neighbor’s crops, cows, or son/daughter all the way up to the
plans of princes and princess. Kings and queens have been made to grovel on the
bellies to the papal throne. It’s been the power mover behind the scenes in
global politics for over 2000 years.
It’s given legitimacy to kings and governments for thousands
of years, raising some up and bringing many down. No other institution has
welded such power over its fellow human beings. Of course, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t gone
unchallenged. There has been numerous political ideologies which has tried to supplant
religion down through the centuries.
However, there has been numerous schisms, reformations, separatist
movements, protests, and so forth which has rejected the institutional power of
organized religion such as the “Great Schism” (aka “The East-West Schism”) of
1054, separating the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church (a fight essentially
over power, giving a “holier than thou” authority of the Bishop of Rome over other
Bishops), Martin Luther’s Reformation of 1517, King Henry VIII’s Reformation of
1527 (aka “The English Reformation”), and countless others, There’s the Sunni
and Shia split of 632 CE which is still being battled everyday on TV screens
and across the internet.
Hinduism, the third
largest religion behind Christianity and Islam, dates back some 4000 years, has
experienced four major internal breaks with dozens of subsets. Buddhism, known
for its peaceful philosophical doctrine, had its first schism just one hundred
years after Buddha died in 483 BC. Christianity at least waited three hundred
years before it began purging competing ideologies like the Arians, Gnostics,
and so forth.
So, with all the reformations, schisms, and other breaks, how many
religions are there today? Although no exact number is possible, there’s an
estimated 10,000 distinct religions in the world today. They range from having
thousands of deities to alleged having one (or is it three with a subset of
hundreds of the lesser divine?) while others have no specific entities,
preferring nature or the natural world. Most (though not necessary all) have
their sacred texts or spoken traditions, holidays/festivals, morals, values, and
mythologies.
Of all of them, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are
the largest, representing 77% of all religious followers. Broken down by the
numbers, Christianity, which represents about 32% of the world’s population,
has 2.2 billion adherents. Islam, which has 23% of the global population, has
roughly 1.6 billion followers, and is the fastest growing organized religion in
the world outside of the Middle East.
It bears mentioning that historically, more people have died
in the name of religion than any other cause. So, how many people are we
talking about? While there’s no way to provide an exact number of deaths, conservative
estimates put the number of dead at over 195 billion in deciding
who God loves the most. A few examples include the Crusades which killed an
estimated 6 million Muslims and Jews. The Thirty Years War killed some 11
million men, women, and children.
The Congolese Genocide (led by King Leopold II of Belgium) resulted
in the deaths of 13 million. The ongoing Islamic War has murdered (since 2000) approximately
150,000 and thousands condemned to slavery (mostly Shia’s, Kurds, Yazidis, and
Coptic Christians). About 20 million Native Americans died as a result of continental
expansion in the name of “Manifest Destiny” (and disease). The Muslim conquest
of India took somewhere around 80 million lives. In Africa, due to Church prohibition
of birth control (including condoms), some 30 million Africans died of AIDs.
Of course, about 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. The
French War of Religion killed some 4 million French Protestants and led to exodus
of tens of thousands so-called “Huguenots”. By comparison, 5000 Jews were killed
during the Spanish Inquisition (although almost every Catholic country carried
out its own inquisition), and these are but a few example.
It bears mentioning that there’s been other, more lethal,
causes of human death down through history such as malaria (which is the single
cause most responsible for human death), the Black Plague, starvation due to
crop failure, drought, and other forms of natural disasters (earthquakes,
volcanos, tornados, hurricanes, storms, etc.). The Spanish Flu of 1918/19 killed over 500
million people worldwide. That’s roughly 1/3 of the global population at the
time, making it the deadliest pandemic in recorded human history.
According to a 2024 Pew report, religious freedom is in
decline. 92% of the 190 countries looked at---183---restricted religious
freedom in one way or another. In the 20 countries comprising the Middle East
and Northern Africa, there was at least one instance each of religious harassment.
The same was true for 43 of 45 European countries as well as 33 of the 35 nations
in the Americas, 44 of 48 sub-Saharan African nations, and 43 of 50
Asian/Pacific countries.
The decline of religious freedom was, in fact, the lowest
recorded since 2007, when Pew began tracking religious freedom. 55% (or 29% of
the total) had “high” or “very high” levels of government imposed restrictions
on religious freedom (most of these were in the Middle East and China).
The countries with the highest rates of religious freedom
included Australia, Canada, Japan, Finland, South Africa, and along the
western coast of South America such as Peru, Chile, Columbia, Bolivia, Paraguay,
and Ecuador and Honduras in Central America. The United States was listed as being a “moderate”
when it came restricting religious freedom.
43% (or 22% of the countries studied) had “high” or “very
high” levels of social hostilities against minority religions. These “hostilities”
included violence against private individuals and groups, religiously affiliated
organizations including schools, as well as religious places of worship. The
worst offenders were Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan due to the very
high level of religious persecution socially and governmentally imposed. So, what religious groups were most affected?
According to the 2024 Pew survey, Christians were the most
heavily persecuted religious group, despite being the world’s largest faith. Persecution
was the worse in predominantly Muslim nations, and in areas where Muslims were in
the majority , including in the UK and Europe, which have been historically
Christian.
Muslims tend to follow the Koran or teachings of Muhammad
while Islamists tend to promote a radicalized political philosophy using the
corrupted version of the Koran’s teachings. Islamists tend to not only oppose
other Muslims, they oppose Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and especially Jews.
In fact, Islamists pretty much oppose anyone who isn’t them.
The third most harassed group, and the smallest of the “Great
Religions”, was Judaism. Jews have long been one of the most hated religious groups
in history, regardless of where they live or how much they’ve tried to integrate.
Fourth were largely the much smaller religions such as Zoroastrianism (which is
the common “grandparent” of most religions including the three Abrahamic religions
of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the Sikhs, Baha’i, etc.
They are closely followed the fifth most harassed group, the
traditional Chinese and Japanese folk religions such as Confucianism, Shintoism,
Taoism, Tengrism, Native American spiritualism, Australian Aboriginal spiritualism, Wicca and
paganism.
The last two most harassed religions were the Hindus and the
Buddhists, which, despite their size (third and fourth largest religions
respectively), tend to be relatively unbothered, but when they are, it’s mostly
in countries with large Muslim populations. Finally, the least harassed group
are the non-affiliated. While as a group they tend to be largely left alone,
But when they are harassed, it has tended to be by those who are most strongly affiliated
with a religion in general rather than any one specific religious group.
Mankind has changed little over time, and like little
children, we tend to blame someone else (“I don’t know” did it) rather than
except responsibility for our actions. In this case, we blame some invisible entity
who we know won’t contradict us, especially if we’ve imbued it with inordinate
power. All we have to do is shift the blame when things go bad or take the
credit when things work out.
Then again, what if all these wars and atrocities were
indeed the wish of some deity? What if Humanity was convinced to play “Risk” while this entity or entities play a cosmic
game of chess and Humanity is their pawn? What, when the game is over and we exist no
more, the deity (or deities) simply moves on to the naïve species somewhere in
the galaxy to start a new game? Either way, I don’t care much for either scenario.
For some reason, I think it’s time we should light a candle for Mankind.
Thank you for reading
"Another Opinion", the Op/Ed blog page for the "militant
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article. Thank you.
Religious Hostilities Hit Six-Year High
How Many People Have Been Killed in the Name of Religion
Pew Global Survey Shows Rising Religious Restrictions
Religious Restrictions Around the World
The Global Religious Landscape
