Religion will always be a delicate issue to discuss and especially to document and photograph. It has been the main reason for so many wars and bloodshed in the 20th century. Isn’t god suppose to unify people and promote peace and prosperity but history has shown us that he has done the complete opposite. Shannon started to document Haitian Voodoo when she moved to Brooklyn in 2005 but had been documenting spiritualism way before that. This type of documentation is not impossible at all. I think it depends on the practitioner and whether he’s very conservative about his religion or a little more liberal.  I know it has to come down to an agreement between the practitioner and the photographer so there won’t be any kind of disrespect toward the religion. In terms of Documentation that is valuable? My personal opinion, yes. Anything that a camera captures is valuable because it’s a frozen time that we’ll never see again unless we have a photograph. They give us a look back in time and help us understand a lot of things we may have not understood in the past.
Documenting Religion
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Ivan, in his “Documenting Religion” states that religion was responsible for many wars and bloodshed in the 20th century. Although religion sometimes was the cause of wars any other time, it certainly wasn’t the cause of wars of 20th century. Except for wars in the Palestine (with minimum casualties compared to any other war), all other wars were caused by atheistic ideologies. The biggest one, World War II was powered by the idea of atheistic socialism, with allusion to race favoritism (which became possible thanks to Darwin’s views about evolution), and sprinkled with Hitler’s occultic preferences. He believed that pure Aryan race was threatened by Negroes, Jews and others. Consequently, since evolution is powered by the survival of the fittest (as he thought), he wanted Germans to be the stronger race. His god – the evolution, was supposed to unify Aryan race, but did quite the opposite. Does it mean that evolution doesn’t exist? Or is it Ivan’s presupposition (that god supposed to do whatever I think he must do) which is not compatible with the nature of the evolutionary processes?