Does religion make war, not peace?

Mention Middle East mayhem or any other large-scale violence going on in the world and the Saloon Bar Philosophers are bound to blame ‘all that bloody religious nonsense’.

 

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

 

The carnage over the past two millennia, all in the name of religion, almost defies belief.

 

Christians spent the first 1700 years slaughtering each other in the name of Jesus Christ, the advocate of peace and brotherly-love. Dissenters were burned at the stake, tortured to death, hanged, crucified and otherwise done to death in frightful ways. The Spanish Inquisition became a byword for state-sponsored violence against those who were thought not to cling wholly to the diktats of the Vatican. We shall probably never know how many were killed for ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding’.

 

The 17^th Century European wars, supposedly in the name of religion killed 35% of the total population.

 

Sunni and Shia continue to this day with their spasmodic  civil war that has been the pattern for at least 1200 years.

 

The history of the Jews is a 2000-year history of attempted genocide.

 

Catholic v. Protestant; Hindu v. Muslim; there has been no shortage of contestants

 

Religion certainly has a great deal of ‘previous’ but there is the question of whether it has been the cause or the pretext.

 

There is a thought-provoking review in The Oldie magazine of a new book, ‘Fields of Blood; Religion and the History of Violence.

 

The main theme is that religion has been made a scapegoat for man’s inherent violence.

 

It must be a powerful argument that religion is used as an incitement to hatred, which is the undoubted case in Islamic terrorism, but it is another to say that religion is the cause when it is more likely to be the sense of humiliation and inadequacy that exists in the Arab world, and therefore jihad becomes an Arab phenomenon, not a religious uprising. It scarcely exists outside the Arab world. Terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan is tribal rather than religious.

 

Mankind are social creatures and this is surely more fundamental in causing conflict than religion per se. We form groups based on language, location, customs, family, tribe, pigment, religion and eventually as distinct races and cultures. Anyone who is not a member of the group is a mistrusted outsider, whether from the next village or another continent. Religious belief is probably the most powerful motivating force for extreme action; if our God is right the other must be Satan. Modern ‘religions’ embrace anti-Semitism, racism, nationalism, Communism and a whole raft of ‘isms’.

 

But no major war in the last two centuries has had religion as its main cause. They have all been based on territory, possession, power, wealth, domination; plus, of course, the deranged ambitions of dictators from Napoleon to Hitler.

 

In the final analysis, it is not about religion. It is about domination.

 

"The fault, dear Brutus, is ………in ourselves."