I recently watched a movie called "Silence". It took place in 1600 when the Christian missionaries went to Japan, in this process they gathered people that was willing to turn their faith and become Christians. 

After some time, Japan started showing what a swamp the country actually is: it prove itself as a place where nothing could ever grow, besides  what it already had. However, Christianity is a religion that requires for it's people to expand the faith, and that is what they did. 

Japan's authorities started looking, and killing if necessary, any trace of Christianity. The foreign religion was persecuted. If any person was found with a religious element of Christianity, they would be forced to deny their God, otherwise they would be taken as prisoners and tortured. 

This movie not only shows us the violence that is part of the history of the interaction between two religions, it also shows us the dependence that human beings have in religion. 

This missionaries weren't any Christians, they were fathers. This means that they were the ones able to baptize, marry, (people in Japan, didn't quite understand how the foreign religion worked, because they thought that when a person was baptized or went through any of the Christian traditions, that person already had a place in heaven, therefore, they mainly looked for what any religious believer looks for: salvation) and perform other religious traditions. Among those, they were the ones hearing people's confessions, giving them forgiveness.

As I said before, the movie shows us the dependence of human beings in something superior. There is a character that shows us the eternal look for forgiveness that Christians in general go through during their life. This character spends the entire movie denying the Christian God --in which he believed in-- and asking the father for forgiveness. Maybe he understood his religion, because, as it is said in the movie: we can never know if the god those converted Christians in Japan believed in was the same God that the Spanish and Portuguese fathers believed in, maybe those people in Japan only believed in the same God they did before, but with another name, rules and traditions. After all, religion is part of our culture, and culture determines the way we understand life. Whoever, maybe Christianity offered something that other religions didn't: a direct connection with God, and even more important, a process by which God is able to forgive us. Maybe Christianity opens the door for impunity, and with it, it comes hope, a kind of hope that allows you to keep living with your, so called, "mistakes".

So, basically, watch the movie if you can, it's an interesting way of understanding religion. But if you really want to understand something, don't look for it at blogs, just let us introduce you to interesting things.