Pacifism - The Religious Concept Of Pacifism

The individual moral concept of "turning the other cheek" is one that belongs to a number of religious traditions, though the position has perhaps arguably been most fully developed as an ethical position in Judaism and then Christianity and as a spiritual position in Buddhism—and, mainly through Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), as a revision of Hindu thought. The major religious tradition with the least apparent pacifist dimension seems to be Islam. Secular ethical pacifism emerged in the nineteenth century alongside other "isms" based on humanist and universalist ethics and overlaps with several ideological strands from liberalism to anarchism and, since the 1970s, feminism.