Religion & Prejudice

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Religion and Prejudice (Unit 2) :

Key words?

Prejudice : To Pre-Judge someone unfairly -> usually based on stereotypes

Discrimination : This is an action -> acting upon prejudice. This can involve treating someone unfairly or preventing them from having equal chance in life.

Stereotype: Having an over simplified mental image of people and applying it to everyone in that group

Scapegoating: Blaming certain groups from problems in society

Patriotism: This is a belief that people from your country and race are better than others. It can be used to a less severe degree to simply mean that someone is proud of their country

Justice: This is a situation where everything is fair and equal. Right action is done and wrong actions are punished

The Causes of Prejudice:

Ignorance - Due to lack of education/ lack of understanding of the culture and lifestyle practices of a race, people can be intolerant of that group e.g. Rastafarians have been viewed as Druggies'

Fear and Uncertainty - A person or race people may fear that their own identity may be lost if another race becomes part of their society. Society may become so multicultural that national identity is lost

Media - have shown certain groups in bad light e.g. muslims as terrorists

Some of the effects of prejudice resulting from above include:

Vulnerability

Fear - it divides communities, people will live in fear of one another, therefore society living in disharmony and only looking out for themselves

Genocide (i.e Holocaust)

Violence

Riots and protests

How can society combat Discrimination ?

Education - We can educate pupils at school from an early age to accept that all people are equal. This will help prevent the development of feelings of fear and ignorance towards people who are different to them

Promoting mixing ( multicultural / race / religion / sex / class) - mixing with others from all groups of society will lead to a better understanding of each other - create diversity

Punishment - Schools and workplace could have a 'zero tolerance' policy on discriminatory behaviour. People and students could be severely punished if they do discriminate e.g. school would permanently exclude a pupil for discriminating and a business may ' fire ' a worker.

Religious Believers ( Leaders ) who have fought against prejudice and discrimination ?

Mahatma Gandhi:

Mahatma Gandhi was a hindu. He started a campaign in South Africa for the equal right =s of indians living . He was successful in leading a peaceful protest which resulted in unfair tex, paid by non-whites, being stopped.

Mahatma Gandhi was successful in achieving 'better' equal rights for all the people in India. All of his protests and campaigns were peaceful , as not only did he believe in equality , he believed in non-violence.

Marting Luther King:

In the USA during the 1950's and 60's black people were not treated the same as 'white people' by the whole of society including the governments. They were not treated as equal citizens with equal rights , and were repeated as the inferior race

Martin Luther King did not believe that the way 'black people' in the USA were treated was fair. He was a black christian minister and started an organisation called " The Civil Rights Movement" - which was to fight for equal rights for all black people in america

Example 1 : In 1960's there was a march of 250k people into the capital of USA, Washington DC demanding that black people were given the rights to vote in political elections. - This is where Martin Luther King made the freedom speech

Example 2 : Martin Luther King organised a ' Bus Boycott', this is where black people were encouraged not to take the public transport, until they were given the equal rights on them. In 1960 under pressure the government changed the segregation laws of the buses ; giving black people an equal usage of rights for public transport.