Religious communities: Addition to interfaith tolerance study

Abstract

Religious communities, each one respectively, represent a community of believers who have identical confession of faith, a unique organization and spiritual power. Each religious community, as a rule, attracts a certain attention of wider social community. They attract greater attention when they criticise or have different attitudes towards certain types of organization of social relations or ethnic norms. Due to these reasons, and because of different origin, time of occurrence, or the circumstances in which they were conceived, they had a distinct dimension of rebellion against the dominant way of thinking, acting or practicing the principles of religious beliefs. Throughout history, this dimension of their existence was common among mainly non-traditional religious communities which emerged as a product of disagreement of an individual who, with his charismatic appearance, was able to instigate a part of the community to adopt a set of beliefs which to a greater or lesser extent, were not in accordance with the confession of the officially recognized traditional religious community. In such con­ditions, but mainly due to the mutual relations often defined by various forms of intolerance among various traditional religious communities operating in the same areas, the principle of interfaith tolerance became more important because it represents a very important segment of coexistence. Such a state, or non existence of interfaith tolerance, or its not existing sufficiently, can have a negative impact on the state of the society as a whole, creating different challenges in it, including those that can affect its security.