A personal attempt to understand the complex relationship between religion and politics

Abstract

Differing concepts of the state, religion and their mutual relations evolved according to various social and historical circumstances in different parts of the world. The denial of the political nature of the ethnonational concept embedded in the very foundations of Judaism or of the various Orthodox churches, or the denial fo the fact that historical Judaism and historical Islam do not see themselves primarily as salvational religions (focused on the personal salvation of the individual in the world to come) but also as communities with a divine mandate to create a model society that will be run entirely according to the divine laws, does not contribute to discovering a consensual solution that could lead us from perpetual conflict to the ease and comfort of peace. Any future common endeavors in mutual respect and convivencia of the members of different religious or ethnoreligious communities, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, must take full account of the existence of this undisputed political dimension in these religious traditions. The author of these lines would like to believe that in the future thanks to an agreed and coordinated humanist but also a theocentric interpretation of the norms and deeply rooted forms of the different religious traditions using the inner patents that exist in every religious tradition, it will be possible to achieve far more than has been achieved by various other methods today.