Religious violence is not new.

But modern inventions have made it more deadly and allowed it to spread farther and faster.

HADI MIZBAN/AJC (ENLARGE)

A car bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in February was linked to sectarian strife. 'There is a global aspect [to religious violence] that never existed before,' says Vincent Cornell of Emory University.

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"Consequence of extremism can be greater because of the technology," said Vincent Cornell, who teaches Middle East and Islamic studies at Emory University.

He is among the thinkers who will gather for Emory's Institute for Comparative and International Studies Monday and Tuesday to lecture and discuss religious extremism in the modern world. The event is free and open to the public.

The Jewish zealots of Jesus' day hid daggers in their clothing, stabbed Roman collaborators in crowded public places, and fled among the panicked crowds in what was a backwater colony.

Technology allows modern killers with religious motivations, such as Mohammed Atta of Sept. 11 infamy, to take down entire buildings full of people far from where they grew up.

Videos of violent acts spread on the Internet sometimes before being reported in mainstream media, Cornell said. The Internet has become the great decentralizer of information, and it provides gathering points and learning destinations for like-minded religious extremists, whether in China, Pakistan or the United States.

TV and radio have been adapted by religious groups to spread their beliefs worldwide.

"There is a global aspect [to religious violence] that never existed before," Cornell said.

The gathered scholars will debate those changes and talk about subjects as diverse as biblical roots of violence and martyrdom, Israeli settler theology, Buddhist intolerance and jihadi cyber-authority.

Religious violence has grown over the past 25 years, said Bruce Knauft of Emory, who will lecture on extremism in the 21st century.

But it is down when compared to historic periods. Ages when religious and political authority were intermixed, such as during the Crusades or the Thirty Years' War in Europe in the early 1600s, were bloody, though they pale compared with secular horrors such as the world wars, he said.

Cornell is hopeful about the possibilities of combating extremism.

Good ideas can spread because of technology as easily as bad ones can, he said.

"If we can identify important and significant factors cross-culturally and across religions that lead to extremist stances, it would be easier then to attack the causes," he said.

"It is [the responsibility of] religious moderates to have a counter-ideology to the extremists. We have to head the extremists off at the pass."