Projects / Programmes
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.11.00 |
Humanities |
Theology |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| H002 |
Humanities |
Theology |
| H001 |
Humanities |
Philosophy |
| H003 |
Humanities |
History and Arts |
religion, violence, Chritianity, Islam, interreligious dialogue, peace, human rights, democracy, exit from religion, scapegoat, theory of violence, languague, Marcel Gauchet, Rene Girard, Eric Weil,
Researchers (5)
Organisations (1)
Abstract
The terrorist attack on WTC, on 11th September 2001, has strongly erased the question of how violence is connected with religion. In the frame of religious studies of modern self-understandings and self-interpretations of Christianity and Islam, we will look for their doctrinal relation to violence and show why and to which extent these religions are actors of peace or/and violence according to their own self-understandings.
Then it follows a research both on their interaction with a process of globalization of human rights and democracy and with the process of transformation of religious link, when the latter becomes more and more an individual affair of free choice and chosen adherence. This research will be based on the sociological theory of an"exit from religion" (M. Gauchet, A. An-Na'im).
In the analysis we will confront the attained results with two theorists of violence: an anthropologist R. Girard and philosopher E. Weil. Girard poses violence as a source of all social order. According to him, the origin of violence is human mimetic desire. The latter is the reason of always present competition among people and endless violence which rules their relationships. For the society to survive this violence has to be transferred to an innocent victim. This theory is proven by disclosing the mechanism of sacrificial substitute from the Greek myths, through important literary works, to religious texts. Eric Weil also dedicates his philosophical thoughts to the problem of violence. The latter is an "other" of a language and it reveals itself in it. Being different from all living beings, only a human being - a being of language - knows violence as such and points at it, because only a human being constructs his own world and other worlds of meaning, in which violence discloses itself as an absurd and meaningless, as an interruption of non-human in human world. Politics as well as morals form life structures in a society and with regards to those a question of human choice between reason (freedom) and violence is raised.
The goal of this research project is in the first place a presentation and comparison of Christian and Muslim conceptions of violence. We are interested in an evaluation of these conceptions from two points of view: firstly from socio-political theory of an "exit from religion", and, secondly, from theories of violence developed by R. Girard and E. Weil. Finally, the research aims to suggest directions on how Christianity and Islam may be more actively and successfully involved in a collaboration of making a more peaceful and a less violent world.
