Abstract
Religion and violence are related in an ambivalent, paradoxical way, for the systems of religious knowledge tend to prohibit violence and to motivate it at the same time. This paper looks for the roots of that ambivalence and reveals particular mechanisms that generate violence within religious systems and their associated practices. It argues that violence in religious systems is present in at least three forms: It is inherent to communication with the “sacred,” it is generated by processes of inclusion and exclusion, shaping religiously interpreted lifeworlds, and it is motivated or moderated by the respective semantics of religious narratives. The paper concludes that violence as a moment of hierophany is constitutive for the living experience in religious systems and cannot be eliminated entirely by moderating semantics.
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Notes
Surprisingly, not even in his last work on religion Luhmann (2002) did pay attention to these consequences that his concept entails, even though he pointed out the conflict generating character of religion (2002: 120 f).
Bellah (2011: 182, 201) stresses the “archetypical” character of the Hawaiian religious system.
For instance the fact that in “cargo cults” indigenous people tried to imitate everyday activities of the Westerners which they believed to posses magic power caused flouting attitudes toward the local religious culture (Worsley 1957).
See also Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpture in Santa Maria della Victoria in Rome depicting this event.
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Srubar, I. Religion and Violence. Paradoxes of Religious Communication. Hum Stud 40, 501–518 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9375-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9375-z