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Cosmic War Essay

Decent Essays

The Omnipresent Violence
Violence is not new. It starts with Abel and Cain. In time, it may change form, yet is not likely to end until the apocalypse. One’s perception of a religion may exacerbate his or her behavior towards others. However, the world will run out of its time, sooner or later, and both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic faiths have definitions of the end. Violent in nature, human beings load their arms due to upcoming war, waged for salvation by the ones who are chosen by God to walk on the true path. Mark Juergensmeyer defines this divine struggle as “cosmic war” and mentions its relation to “metaphysical conflicts between good and evil.” Good and evil are also subject to change depending on who describes them.
Jewish violence in the Middle East started as soon as Jews survive the holocaust. In World War II, Nazis tortured scores of Jews to death as well as other non-Germans. …show more content…

Juergensmeyer posits cosmic war in his book as “a part of the heritage of religious traditions that stretch back to antiquity, and abundant examples of warfare may be found in sacred texts.” He also argues that
[cosmic war images] are larger than life. They evoke great battles of the legendary past, and they relate to metaphysical conflicts between good and evil. Notions of cosmic war are intimately personal but can also be translated to the social plane. Ultimately, though, they transcend human experience. What makes religious violence particularly savage and relentless is that its perpetrators have placed such religious images of divine struggle—cosmic war—in the service of worldly political battles. For this reason, acts of religious terror serve not only as tactics in a political strategy but also as evocations of a much larger spiritual confrontation.
According to Juergenmeyer’s argument cosmic war can be contracted to a triad: the past, the future, and human’s perception of the first

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