page_title: Discrimination
section_title: Religious beliefs
hierarchical_section_title: Discrimination / Examples of Discrimination / Religious beliefs
caption_attribution_description: Lotshampa refugees in Beldangi Camp
context_page_description: Discrimination is the act of making distinctions between human beings based on the groups, classes, or other categories to which they are perceived to belong. People may discriminate on the basis of age, caste, criminal record, height, weight, physical appearance, disability, family status, gender identity, gender expression, generation, genetic characteristics, marital status, nationality, profession, color, race and ethnicity, religion, sex and sex characteristics, sexual orientation, political ideology, social class, personality, as well as other categories. Discrimination especially occurs when individuals or groups are treated "in a way which is worse than the way people are usually treated," on the basis of their actual or perceived membership in certain groups or social categories. It involves the group's initial reaction or interaction going on to influence the individual's actual behavior towards the group's leader or the group, restricting members of one group from opportunities or privileges that are available to members of another group, leading to the exclusion of the individual or entities based on illogical or irrational decision-making.
context_section_description: Religious discrimination is valuing or treating people or groups differently because of what they do or do not believe in or because of their feelings towards a given religion. For instance, the Jewish population of Germany, and indeed a large portion of Europe, was subjected to discrimination under Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party between 1933 and 1945. They were forced to live in ghettos, wear an identifying star of David on their clothes, and sent to concentration and death camps in rural Germany and Poland, where they were to be tortured and killed, all because of their Jewish religion. Many laws (most prominently the Nuremberg Laws of 1935) separated those of Jewish faith as supposedly inferior to the Christian population.
  Restrictions on the types of occupations that Jewish people could hold were imposed by Christian authorities. Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to religious Jews, pushing them into marginal roles that were considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending, occupations that were only tolerated as a "necessary evil".  The number of Jews who were permitted to reside in different places was limited; they were concentrated in ghettos and banned from owning land. In Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims are not allowed to publicly practice their religions and they cannot enter Mecca and Medina. Furthermore, private non-Muslim religious gatherings might be raided by the religious police.
  In a 1979 consultation on the issue, the United States commission on civil rights defined religious discrimination in relation to the civil rights which are guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.  Whereas religious civil liberties, such as the right to hold or not to hold a religious belief, are essential for Freedom of Religion (in the United States as secured by the First Amendment), religious discrimination occurs when someone is denied "equal protection under the law, equality of status under the law, equal treatment in the administration of justice, and equality of opportunity and access to employment, education, housing, public services and facilities, and public accommodation because of their exercise of their right to religious freedom".
caption: In the 1990s, Bhutan expelled its Hindu population or forced it to leave the country in order to preserve Bhutan's Buddhist culture and identity.
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