Does Religion Cause War?

by on 2012/01/24

A world without religion would certainly haven't any grounds for spiritual persecution, that's true, but would that equate to less conflict? Personally, I don't suppose so.

Firstly, let's cope with the popular fallacy that 'most wars are caused by religion'. That is simply untrue. An instructional study as regards to the function of faith in seventy three main conflicts over the past three,500 years concluded that 60% of wars had no religious motivation whatsoever and only four% have been considered as actually spiritual wars.

Any identifiable 'set' to which you may belong - household, colour, creed, nation, class and a myriad of other separate allegiances - defines two basic teams: an 'us' group and an 'other' group. Our human tendency is to wish to bond with the 'us' group and a part of that bonding process entails an equivalent distancing of ourselves from the 'other' group. If conflict ought to come up between such teams, doubtlessly escalating all the way as much as warfare, that bonding alone will, in lots of instances, be highly effective sufficient motivation to dictate behaviour.

There are various points that governments choose to resolve by means of battle and there are, undeniably, instances during which governments have sought to make use of existing social divisions, including spiritual divisions, in order to pursue their own agendas. As an example, contemplate the demonisation of the Jews in Germany through the Thirties achieved by way of an enormous propaganda campaign following the seizing of power by the Nazi party. This was a crucial precursor to the following try to eradicate the population in the 'closing solution'. The purpose of the marketing campaign was to get folks to view the Jews, not as human beings, but as vermin.

The holocaust was an instance of what has extra not too long ago change into known as 'ethnic cleaning' - a phrase I personally discover unpalatable - but the reasons behind this try at genocide had been basically not religious. The Jews have been used as a scapegoat for the failure of the country as much as and including the First World War. In the act of rebuilding the nation and uniting the nation, they have been identified and labelled because the 'different' group. The distancing of the vast majority of the inhabitants from the 'other' group resulted in a strengthening of allegiance with the 'us' group which, in this case, was the nation; and that was the desired result.

The Jews were not persecuted by the Nazis due to their religious beliefs. They were persecuted as a result of they had been identified by a ruthless administration as a dispensable and comparatively defenseless minority that was also simply recognisable as the 'different'. What would Hitler have carried out in the identical state of affairs had spiritual division not been a tactic available to him i.e. if religion simply didn't exist?

Within the conclusion to Mein Kampf, we might read the next:

    'A state which, in this age of racial poisoning, dedicates itself to the care of its finest racial elements should someday turn into lord of the Earth.' - Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler

In these few phrases we have now a central tenet of the Hitler philosophy. His struggle (kampf) was not primarily about faith; it was about race. If faith had not been accessible as a software to help his administration in the identification of a scapegoat group (the other), there have been plenty of other races ranked in the lower echelons, in his grand order of issues, which may have equally effectively sufficed.

Personally, I believe it is naive to conclude that with out religion there would be much less battle although it's true that there would be one much less social division that is likely to be manipulated by those in positions of power. Fairly merely, battle is a frequent consequence of 1 society in search of to dominate one other for no matter purpose.

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This post is written by Evan Smith 10, he is a web enthusiast and ingenious blogger who loves to write about many different topics, such as SEO Company. His educational background in journalism and family science has given him a broad base from which to approach many topics, including Internet Marketing and many others. He has a really strong passion for scouring the internet in search of  inspiational topics.


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