Explain why religious conflicts occur. Is it only that religious ideologies disagree, or is geography involved?

How do you think religious conflicts can be resolved?

American journalist and political analyst Daniel Lazare, author of books such as The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy, discusses in an article published in The Nation magazine the possibilities that the past will serve us to Resolve current religious conflicts, which have been aggravated by the resurgence of fanaticism.

According to Lazare, most people agree with religious fanaticism is out of control and what should be restrained. But the question is how to do it.

At one end of the debate are the hard ones, says Lazare, the attentive militants who argue that the problem is not only religious discord but religion itself. On the other hand, there are the moderates, who claim that religion is tolerable as long as it is not used as a justification for harassing others or condemning them to hell for tiny theological differences.

The journalist refers to another author, Benjamin Kaplan, who in his work Divided by Faith, gives an account of the elaborate measures that small groups of Catholics and Protestants took to maintain peace during the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and avoid thus killing each other in the name of a Christ who loved peace.

For example, since lords and gentlemen of sixteenth-century Austria had the right to have Protestants serve them in their residences, the latter in turn had permission to walk the streets of Catholic Vienna every Sunday morning, toward the estates of Protestant nobles, in which they could perform their cults freely. No one killed them or arrested them for it, despite the fact that German Protestants and Habsburg Catholics battled each other in the Netherlands at the same time.

Under a policy known as "simultaneum", on the other hand, in cities with dual religiosity, Catholics and Protestants even shared the same churches. Imagine what would happen today if a rabbi fanatic and a stirring Imam were to share the same synagogue or mosque, says Lazare.