Narrow Identities and Violence

Personal individualism of individual includes more lark about of the individual such as race, pietism, profession, personal interests, ethnicity, and language among other attributes. tho all over the world we see individuals and groups defining themselves in infinitesimal and exclusive terms.We take the view that, in day to day life, the incompatible aspects of personality remain latent. Social and economic context present a background against which individuals choose to retain these different possibilities or to commit to matchless of these possibilities and to renounce the others.Religious Indentity and forcefulnessThere are few topics that altercate the capabilities of historians more(prenominal) than religion and violence. When the two subjects are combined, the challenge is that increased. How do historians, discuss the often extreme, or alien manifestations of spiritual belief?And how should we rationalise apparitionally motivated violenceor violence that seems to be excite by religious beliefs or authorities?Religious and violence opens up a very territories for our consideration. This is the assumption that religious violence is really non fundamentally about religion that other interests, claims, or identities of an economic, ethnic, political, or regular(a) psychological nature are at stake.With this assumption it seems to imply that religion can be reduced to something else.I certainly endorse the idea that in some situations in medieval and primaeval novel ages, religious violence is really about religion. This may be less true of more recent times.I wonder, however, how consistently useful it is to think of religion as a amicable identity in medieval and early modern ages. Situations certainly existed in which people assigned religious trys to one some other and/or thought of themselves as part of a religious group, most obviously in religious borderlands or in regions where multiple religious groups lived alongside one anoth er.But the insight first provided by Wilfred Cantwell metalworker and subsequently refined by a number of historians, namely that it was only over the course of the late Middle Ages, and in particular in the hot up of the Reformation, that the concept of religion took on something approaching its modern sense of an nonionized set of beliefs and practices about the divine rather than an attitude of piety toward the gods, is an central one to keep in mind.And while it is certainly true that many forms of religious violence in late medieval or early modern Europe were directed against neighbors assigned some fixed label such as Jews, Dalits, incidents of religious violence may have been especially likely to occur at moments when new beliefs were spreading into an area and the religious situation was far too fluid to be neatly defined.So when public scenes of disrespect to the consecrated host sparked violent Catholic vengeance in France around 1560, the violence was motivated by o utrage against those so depraved as to attack Gods body, but the clash cannot be usefully analyzed as one between two groups with fixed social identities.The violence was all about rival beliefs and their public manifestation and exonerationa clear matter of religion as a emblematic system. To go from there to speaking of religion as an irreducible identity is a linguistic step it probably isnt useful to take.