Religiophobia Fear of Religion, Fear of the Religious By Issa Diab  In Religious studies, Religion is defined as “an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to the supernatural, and to spirituality.” 1 There is a debate among scholars whether religion is a “cultural system” or “anthropological category”. 2 The political economist and sociologist Max Weber showed, in his book “the Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism” 3 , the effect of religion on the country’s economy and policy making. Whatever, needless to say that religion affects the religious human being’s behaviour and society. In monotheistic religions, the supernatural is the world of God (Elohim/Yahweh and Allah). God is the perfection of goodness, strength and knowledge. Thus, religion is the means that relates the human being into the world of perfection, in terms of goodness, power, and knowledge, in order to transform the religious human being’s character into harmony with the perfect God. Religiophobia is a composite term formed by merging the two words Religion and phobia. Religiophobia, on syntactic level, means: “the phobia that comes from religion and affects the practitioner or the people around him”, or “religious practices that restrict others’ freedom and abuse human rights. In use, a new element was added to the syntactic meaning of Religiophobia; this is a negative reaction to this fear, in different ways, towards religion in general and affects mainly the religious people making them discriminated people. We have now three behavioural elements in this issue: Religion, Phobia, and discrimination.  Issa Diab holds 4 PhDs: in Theology, in History of Semitic Religions, in Societies and Culture in the Arab and Muslim World, and in Religious Sciences. He is a university professor in Lebanon, he lectures in his majors. He is a member of a research committee on Judaism in the University of Strasbourg. He is also a Global Translation Consultant working with the United Bible Societies. To make a contact: e- mail: issadiab@hotmail.com; Issa.Diab@usj.edu.lb; Mobile: +961 (0)3 275930. 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion. Retrieved August, 8, 2013. 2 While religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion, used in religious studies courses, was proposed by Clifford Geertz, who simply called it a "cultural system" (Clifford Geertz, Religion as a Cultural System, 1973). A critique of Geertz's model by Talal Asad categorized religion as "an anthropological category." (Talal Asad, The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category, 1982.) 3 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Germany 1905; the book was published in English: Max Weber, Peter R. Baehr, Gordon C. Wells, The Protestant ethic and the "spirit" of capitalism and other writings. Penguin 2002. ISBN 978-0-14-043921-2.