[Xujhan]

Originally Posted by dr2005

If I had a pound for every time someone has rolled out that claim, I would be laughing all the way to the bank now. Regardless of the interpretation you apply to history, that simply is not true. The First and Second World Wars killed more people than any other conflict in human history and had nothing at all to do with religion, as did the overwhelming majority of European conflicts which were mostly down to who insulted who in which court and monarchs using their armies in retaliation. Break the causes down to their most basic and you come up with human greed and lines on a map, which would only really be resolved if you remove the notion of land ownership or possession altogether. In any event, it's not God that has inspired such violence - it's simply a convenient excuse, and if we humans are good at anything it's finding convenient excuses.

It depends somewhat on how you define the cause of a war. On a political level, I agree with you. History pretty definitely shows that kings and emperors who go to war for religious reasons are relatively few compared to those who do so out of sheer greed. Wars aren't fought by monarchs and politicians though; the fighting is done by masses of average people. To you and me and most people throughout history, the lines on the map don't mean much. They have no reason to; whether or not my country's border encompasses a particular hill or valley has very little effect on my ability to put food on the table. The accusation is not so much that religion inspires the leaders who ignite war - though it does sometimes do that - but that religion is a tool used by those people to gather willing armies. It's hardly the only one, I grant you, but it definitely is one. Anything that calls people to have unquestioning and unearned devotion to or trust in any figure, whether it's a literal god or a monarch/leader or the country itself, is incredibly dangerous.