Read the following passage, give literary translation, express your opinion

Religious Movements

Forces for Transnational Peace and Harmony, or Catalysts to Holy Wars?

High ideals inspire the believers of nearly all the world's major religious movements. Indeed, many of the principles they espouse are very similar: reverence for the sanctity of life, acceptance of all people as creations of the deity as equal (regardless of race or color), and the need for self-sacrifice and compassion. These are noble ideals. They speak to universals across time and place – to enduring values in changing times. Moreover, they recognize no boundaries for their eternal validity – no north, south, east, or west – but only true virtue wherever found, and the relevance of moral precepts (e.g., the prohibition of killing and the value of working for the betterment of humankind) throughout the entire world.

If all the world's great religious movements – approximately 1.8 billion Christians, 972 million Muslims, 733 million Hindus, 315 million Buddhists, and 18 million Jews – espouse universalistic ideals that accept all people's rights, why are     some of those same religions often seen as sources of international conflict – of exclusivism, hatred, terror, and war? Sociologists of religion answer that it is because these same universalistic religions are managed by organizations that often adopt a particularistic outlook (Juergensmeyer; Schwartz). They conceive the world and history through an ideological lens that views one true deity protecting a single people against inferior others. This outlook inspires an ethic that justifies violence, plunder, and conquest, in part because outsiders tend to be seen as threatening rivals, whose loyalty and allegiance to other deities represents a challenge to their own religion's claim of universality. In a word, religious movements often practiыe intolerance— disrespect for diversity and the right of people to freely embrace another religion's beliefs. The next logical step is for fanatics to paint these imagined enemies as evil, unworthy of mercy, and to justify brutal violence against them.

This inclination of extremist religious movements to evoke prejudice and aggression leads some realist theorists of international politics to conclude that such movements are more a menace than a pacific influence (despite the fact that paganistic and atheistic societies recognizing no higher deity have equally long violent histories of waging wars under transcendental logic against external enemies and their own people). Observing that most wars have been fought in the name of religion, these realist critics ask the world to acknowledge the viciousness and mean-spiritedness of followers who betray their religion's humanistic and global values by championing a style of religious thought that denies that morality is about      nourishing life, not destroying it.

UNIT 11

TRADE AND MONETARY ISSUES IN A GLOBALIZED POLITICAL ECONOMY

 As the United Nations convened in the 1997 opening session, leaders faced an unfamiliar opportunity. Much of the world was savouring a surge in economic growth made possible largely by the removal of the Cold War's ideological chains and the economic distortions great-power rivalries had caused. Growing international trade was transforming the ways people were living and interacting. Newly affluent people and emerging middle classes were basking in the freedom of a promising future. Much of the world now set its sights on generating even more prosperity, while confronting the awesome task of reducing the huge gap between the rich and poor and of preserving the peace that allowed such vigorous economic growth. The world concentrated on finding new ways of making money, not war.

The quest for wealth is an ageless pursuit. Because it provides the means by which many other prized values can be realized, the successful management of economics lies at the center of how governments define their national interests. What practices (and the underlying philosophies that justify them) should they embrace to regulate commercial and monetary activities within their borders? And what policies should each state adopt to influence trading and financial exchanges with other states?

 These are the principal concerns of political economy. Scientists analyze the ways in which the international political economy has evolved, investigate how trade and monetary activities in today's growing globalized marketplace are creating new issues, and the promise and peril that reside in how these issues are and will be addressed in the twenty-first century.