All the religions of the world contain storehouses of symbols and metaphors of war and violence. At the beginning of the sacred history of the Bible – the fountainhead of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – God “Himself” hardens Pharaoh’s heart to set the Egyptians up for slaughter. The firstborn child of every Egyptian family is slain until every Egyptian family knew death. Bloody stories of warfare, pillage, rape, and conquest fill the opening books of the Torah. Such texts lay the basis for the Holy War tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The New Testament contains bloody portrayals of Jesus’ suffering on the cross, Paul’s metaphors of continual spiritual warfare, and the horrific images in the Book of Revelationso dear to apocalyptic Christians. The crusades, the inquisition, and the European wars of religion following the Reformation are all part of the history of Christianity. Islam tells and retells the stories of the Prophet’s battles and conquest and there is the...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Bibliography
Bandura, A. (2004). The role of selective moral disengagement in terrorism and counterterrorism. In F. Moghaddam & A. Marsella (Eds.), Understanding terrorism. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.
Bass, T. (Ed.). (2000). Obedience to authority. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence. New York: Random House.
Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the sacred (trans: Gregory, P.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
Girard, R. (1996). The Girard reader (J. Williams, Ed.). New York: Crossroads.
Horgan, J. (2006). The psychology of terrorism. London: Routledge Press.
Jones, J. (2002). Terror and transformation: The ambiguity of religion in psychoanalytic perspective. London: Routledge.
Jones, J. (2008). Blood that cries out from the Earth: The psychology of religious terrorism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Juergensmeyer, M. (2000). Terror in the mind of God. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority. New York: Harper & Row.
Stern, J. (2003). Terror in the name of God. New York: Ecco Press.
Waller, J. (2002). Becoming evil. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zimbardo, P. (2004). A situationalist perspective on the psychology of evil. In A. Miller (Ed.), The social psychology of good and evil. New York: Guilford.
Zimbardo, P., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. (1999). Reflections on the Stanford prison experiment. In T. Bass (Ed.), Obedience to authority. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Jones, J.W. (2020). Violence and Religion. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_849
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_849
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24347-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24348-7
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences