Professor Emeritus Nick Gier speaks on the origins of religious violence
University of Idaho emeritus professor Nick Gier said much of the religious violence in the world has been caused by a fusion of religious and national identity.
Gier led a Martin Forum presentation titled “The Origins of Religious Violence” Thursday where he spoke about religious violence. The Martin Forums is a series of lectures that covers a wide range of subjects relating to international relations and politics.
Gier taught in the Philosophy Department at UI from 1972-2003. He was also a senior fellow in the Martin Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution from 1990-2000.
Gier has published several books. His presentation centered largely on his most recent book titled “The Origins of Religious Violence: An Asian Perspective.” He spoke to the UI community about his theories on the causes of religious violence.
Gier spoke on the difference between Western, or Abrahamic, religions, and Eastern religions. He said Abrahamic religions have a God who is worshipped as the highest good.
“The Abrahamic religions…God is the highest good and the source of all moral value,” he said.
Many Eastern religions, Gier said, contrast in that the idea of a divine unity is the highest reality.
“A moral God in the Abrahamic religions but far more religiously motivated violence,” he said.
Gier said Western society tends to think of Eastern religions as being more peaceful than Western religions, although that’s not always the case.
“The name of this book was originally ‘The Peace of the East’ and I was going to argue that all Asian religions, lucky for them have not committed any religiously motivated violence,” he said. “Sadly that’s not true and it took me a long time to be disabused of those original thoughts about the purity and the peacefulness of the Asian religions.”
Gier said some of the religiously motivated violence that has happened in the East has sometimes been done in the name of Eastern religions. He talked about religious persecution of Buddhists in Imperial Japan, great destruction caused by a sect in China in the 1800s and the violence that has been done by and between Zen Buddhist sects, among other things.
Gier said religions could be divided into three categories: religions of obedience to God, religions of knowledge and religions of practice.
“All of our religions were formed in what I call a pre-modern context, a pre-modern context of harmony among all people, a holistic view of society,” Gier said. “Modernism is designed to make distinctions.”
Gier said one of the things that have caused religious violence through history is the transnational fusion of religion and national identity.
“When you fuse them you have a sure recipe for religious violence,” he said.
Corey Bowes can be reached at [email protected]