PAIN. Most religious traditions seek to minimize suffering and explain its causes. At the same time, many religions around the world promote painful behavior in specific ritual contexts and produce influential discourse that praises the value of pain or glorifies those who either endure pain or willfully hurt themselves. Although such positive evaluation of pain in religious contexts is diminishing, it is still widely normative. In 1984, Pope John Paul II stated that "Christianity is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain.… In a sense, it creates, rather than solves the problem of pain."

Definitions of Pain

The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage." The vast majority of people know pain directly and vividly as a noxious feeling...