Religious Persecution in the World

An Infographic

This infographic from the Pew Research Center and Macleans.ca shows how free you are to worship around the world. What’s interesting is that the highest amount of persecution is in and about Asia. India and China are pretty bad, and so is the Middle East. I can understand the Middle East being pretty bad because it is has a conservative Islamic culture, generally intolerant of other religions. But Asia is a mixed bag of religions; you have Christians mixing with Hindus mixing with Muslims, and yet it is rated very high on persecution.

The graphic shows that Sri Lanka is rated high when it comes to religious persecution too. We don’t seem to be a very tolerant nation. There are plenty of reports of violence towards Christians (I have had friends who were beaten up for being Christian), vandalism in churches, anti-conversion bills being put forward in the parliament. I don’t know how much of the violence aimed towards Hindus and Muslims was because of the war or were unrelated incidents, but either way it does not make for a very relaxing environment. Colombo itself is not so bad really. There is a good enough mix of religions and ethnicity here to make people more companionable, but you still can face a bit of ridicule for being different or ‘strange’ in your beliefs.

Here’s hoping that things would get better.