Religions

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Term Paper Title	Religions
# of Words	2399
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	9.6

Religions

        When studying history, both in a professional and academic

sense, we try to make connections between civilizations and time

periods.  Historians have attempted to discover universal constants of

human nature, a bond that forms from continent to continent, human

being to human being.  Is there a constant quality that all peoples

posses, and is reflected in all civilizations?  Indeed, it is

extremely difficult to make generalizations about centuries of modern

history.  To say that something is true of all of history is virtually

impossible, as a counter-example exists for just about anything that

can be said of any group of civilizations.  To say that all religions

are spread by violence is equally unfair and untrue - because

contrasted religions has been spread in exceedingly diverse regions of

the world, by vastly different cultures.  Islam, as a prime example,

has been characterized inequitably by historians and the media as a

religion of violence.  To put it bluntly, as this article does, "Islam

was mainly spread through Arab territorial conquests (Sudo, 4)."

However, upon examination, it is not fair to make the generalization

that Islam is a religion of violence, and one notices when looking at

world religion on a whole, one finds that Islam was no more violent

than any other religion.  In fact, not only is Islam not a

fundamentally violent philosophy, but we can also see that many other

religions normally considered "non-violent," such as Christianity or

Hinduism, have been spread through bloody conquest.  Thus, in

searching for a universal constant of history, we ought not fall into

the "fallacy of abstractions," as Sydney J. Harris keenly puts it, and

assume that because of isolated incidents and conflicts of territorial

ambitions, that all religions have violent tendencies.

        Islam has, throughout the centuries, been somewhat a victim of

circumstance - indeed it has been perceived by many as oppressive and

cruel.  This belief originated over a thousand years ago, when Islamic

peoples first threatened the western world.  As they slowly undermined

Byzantine authority, Christians became terrified of their presence,

resulting in widespread animosity and aversion.  Hindus and Buddhists

of the South Asian subcontinent lived under Islamic law for hundreds

of years (Ahmad, et. al., 186), and eventually, in the twentieth

century, split the region into angry factio...

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