Word: violent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fighting and dying under religious flags go on with a violent persistence elsewhere around the world. Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster trade killings in a kind of perpetual motion of futility. Arabs and Israelis stand tensely at borders of territorial, cultural and religious dispute. In the Philippines, Moslem separatists are in rebellion against a Christian majority. Greek-Cypriot Orthodox Christians confront Turkish-Cypriot Moslems across a sullen truce line. Pakistan separated from India because Moslems feared the rule of a Hindu majority...
...this point in the 20th century, the strange vitality of what seem to be religious wars? Westerners tend to regard them as something anachronistic-an offense against the heritage of the Enlightenment, spasms of violent superstition. If war is often enough inexplicable, religious conflict at least seems to carry war's inherent irrationality into an even uglier, throwback realm of absolutes, beyond the reach of compromise. Or perhaps it is simply that agnostic societies find it difficult to understand why anyone would think religion worth fighting about...
...justifications for killing. In 1915 the Bishop of London asked his congregation to "kill Germans, to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill." The dark side of religious conviction can be a violent intractability, an avenging angel's note of retribution. As Martin Luther wrote, "He who will not hear God's word when it is spoken with kindness must listen to the headsman when he comes with his ax." Religion can provide a warmth of certitude and belonging. When...
...continuing confidence of Sagan and other life-on-Mars enthusiasts was bolstered in 1971 and '72 when Mariner 9, from an orbit that brought it as close to the Martian surface as 825 miles, sent back thousands of pictures indicating that Mars was a dynamic, changing planet with violent weather, riverbeds and gulleys that appeared to have been carved out by running water...
...example of the decline, Mudge cited the week of June 11 to 18--"fiscal week 50," he called it--when 28 of 32 projected thefts occurred, two of four projected violent crimes occurred, and no sex crimes out of 1.5 projected occurred...