You might appreciate viewing this You Tube video by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
The ADL created this 80 second video about 2013-MAR-20 to launch their centennial year. It received almost a million views within 8 days. It's theme is that if everyone stood up against bigotry, we would change history. We could live in a world without assassinations, hatred, homophobia, genocide, transphobia, etc. Many people who made contributions to peace and love would still be alive today and contributing to society instead of having been assassinated.
The sound track is John Lennon's "Imagine." Lennon, founder of the Beatles and an advocate for peace was himself assassinated by Mark Chapman who was offended by the song which he regarded as blasphemy.
1
Reza Aslan's quotation on the linkage of religion and hatred:
Aslan (1972-) is an Iranian-American writer, scholar of religions and professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
He has written a number of books on religion, including:
This quote is repeated elsewhere on this web site because we are so fond of it:
A man told his grandson: "A terrible fight is going on inside me -- a
fight between two wolves. One is evil, and represents hate, anger,
arrogance, intolerance, and superiority . The other is good, and represents
joy, peace, love, tolerance, understanding, humility, kindness, empathy,
generosity, and compassion. This same fight is going on inside you, inside
every other person too."
The grandson then asked: "Which wolf will win?" The old man replied
simply: "The one you feed." Anon.
Toni Morrison (1931-) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University. She won the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her Nobel acceptance speech on 1993-DEC-07 included the following statement:
"Oppressive language does more than represent violence. It is violence. It
does more than represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge. ... It
must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood,
laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of
respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line
and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language
-- all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not
permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas." 6
If she were delivering the same speech today, she might well have added
oppressive "homophobic language" and "transphobic language" to her list.
This section discusses instances of religious hatred,
describes why they occur, and suggests how they might be avoided. Unfortunately,
there are no quick fixes to this problem.
Deborah Caldwell, "The Problem With Monotheism: Why the world's two
largest faiths, Christianity and Islam, have a tendency to 'turn evil'." A
Beliefnet interview of Charles Kimball, at:
http://www.beliefnet.com/
Amazon.com lists the following books under the topic "religious hatred."
If you see a generic ad below, click on your browser's refresh key.
Reports on oppression and hatred involving, in part, religion:
U.S. State Department's annual human rights reports: The Bureau
of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the U.S. Department of State
publishes Country human rights and religious freedom reports annually.
Sadly, although the reports catalog human rights abuses and victories in
over 175 countries, it neglects conditions within the U.S. itself. See:
http://www.state.gov/
Hatewatch.org "monitors the evolving problem of online bigotry.
Visit their news feed or their
web site.