Do Religious Bias Still Exist?
COMBATING RELIGIOUS BIAS
In their everyday life, many members of religious or belief communities face discrimination based on their religion or belief. They are unduly restricted in the enjoyment of their civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. As such, members of certain religious or belief communities suffer discrimination in their access to public education, health services or public posts. In extreme cases, some of them are also arrested or killed due to their religious affiliation.
Religious discrimination is an act of treating a person or group differently because of their religion or what they believe in. Specifically, it is when adherents of different religions or denominations are treated unequally, either before the law or in institutional setting such as employment and housing.
Tiffany Jana said bias itself, is just the preference of one thing over another. I hope that it’s not getting a bad rep like diversity did once upon a time because it does scare people, but it really is just a function of the human condition. If we were not able to make shortcuts and quickly make decisions and form opinions about things, it would take us too long to deliberate. We really wouldn’t survive as human species. You need to be able to look at an orange and know from your previous experience that it’s not going to kill you. So bias is just preferring one thing over another.
The United Nations has been concerned with this issue since its foundation and the prohibition of religious discrimination is enshrined in all core international human rights treaties. In this regard, States have the duty to refrain from discriminating against individuals or groups based on their religion and belief (obligation to respect); they are required to prevent such discrimination, including from non-State actors (obligation to protect); and must take steps to ensure that, in practice, every person in their territory enjoys all human rights without discrimination of any kind (obligation to fulfill it)
Now, it’s not a problem when we’re talking about your favorite food, your favorite color, your favorite flavor but it does get challenging when we start having preferences about people particularly in the spaces where we’re talking about things that they can’t control, and when we get into protected categories like gender, race, religion, age, having a preference for or against anything in that area is definitely sketchy territory and in the workplace, that’s protected. So you can’t simply choose to promote somebody because they happen to share a religion with you if that’s the reason that you promote them over someone else, that’s illegal. So that’s the dangerous ground.
Now, having the bias, as I said, is not a problem in itself. It really isn’t your fault either. That’s the other important message in this article. It’s not your fault that you have bias. Our culture really kind of acclimates us to preferences in one direction to the other. Everything that we read, everything that we see, media consumption, influences from family, friends, institutions, all of these things are biased by nature and really in many cases, people are getting information from good people who care about them and that information is not always useful and it’s not always timely.
Perception of religious bias
“The Youth Wing of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, YOWICAN, has accused President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration of marginalizing Christians and running Nigeria as a Muslim organization.
Rising from an emergency meeting in Abuja, on Monday, YOWICAN claimed that the Buhari-led Federal Government was executing Islamic agenda.
A statement by the group’s National President, Daniel Kadzai, pointed out that the removal of Christian religious studies from primary/secondary schools, especially in the North and the alleged unequal treatment meted out to Christians in the North showed that the current government was out to kill the Christian religion” (source: Nwafor Polycarp, vanguardngr.com on 16/05/2016 )
Mr. Ishaku Manu said overcoming religious is very possible because true Christians don’t discriminate, we love irrespective of religion, race and culture. He defined violent extremism as beliefs and actions of people who support or use ideologically motivated violence to achieve radical ideological, religious or political views. He further stated that the selfish politicians use violent extremism to attain their selfish aims E.G Ndamdi Kanu of the Indigenous People of Biafra, he has motive behind what has been doing. Boko Haram is not left out. Youths are involved because they are idle, jobless, lacks personal vision. Economies don’t get better with bias of any kind.
Mr. Gideon Daniel said, it’s not really possible to overcome religious bias because directly or not you can find yourself doing it. He tried explaining his reason. For instance you have an opportunity for employment, you will think of someone close to you first either from your family, religion or culture. He buttress by saying it does not matter the person’s religion so long as the relationship is closed and tight, before considering others.
Mr. Aliyu Nenoni Sheriff, stated religious bias exist and in my opinion, it’s the fault of our religious leaders and the solution is to go back to our holy books stop listening to these so called “Men of God” because we mostly follow them
He further said we the masses are part of the problem, because we tend to follow people blindly and that is where we are part of the problem because we fail to seek knowledge that will help us live in peace rather most of us seek knowledge that will tear us as a nation.
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