ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Religious intolerance is a form of intolerance against a person or group on the basis of, or lack of, their religious beliefs or practices. It can be motivated both by different religious beliefs, as well as by other kinds of ideologies, as well as by an anti-religious feeling or excessive religious zeal.

Religious intolerance and religious persecution
Religious persecution is an extreme case of intolerance involving abuse, violence, persistent aggression, and the death of an individual or a religious group. The persecution of this nature usually flourishes because of the absence of religious tolerance, freedom of religion and religious pluralism.

Persecution, in this context, may involve aggression, stoning, torture, imprisonment, unjustified executions, denial of benefits and civil rights and freedoms. It may also involve confiscation of property, destruction of property or incitement to hatred, among other things.

Religious monopoly is an appeal to religious intolerance. Since children, human beings are aware of their impotence towards fundamental things like food, love and life itself. Religion is socially conceived as a method to face loss and fear of death; it teaches moral principles and causes people to follow them. But, precisely because religions are such powerful sources of morality and community sense, they easily become vehicles to flee the impotence, which so often manifests itself in oppression and imposition of hierarchies. In today's world, people address ethnic and religious differences in new ways, by clinging to a religion they consider true, by encircling co-religionists and placing those who do not embrace that religion below.

Two ideas often feed intolerance and lack of respect for religion. The first, that a certain religion is the only true and the others are false or have moral failures. People who think this is not monolithic, they can also believe that others deserve respect for their beliefs, provided they do not hurt. The second is that where the State and private citizens should force people to embrace the right way to address religion. It is an idea that is spreading, even in modern democracies. Recent examples include the application of the Sharia (shari'a) law by Islamic judges in Africa and Asia, the destruction of the Buddha statues by the Taliban in Afghanistan, decades of religious war in Ireland, the recent ethnic partition and cleansing - based on each other's religion - of Yugoslavia, France's resistance to tolerate religious symbols in schools and the extreme right-wing Indian claims that minorities in India must be integrated into the Hindu culture. The reappearance of this thought presupposes