Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
Bearing in mind that Judaism is 5,000 years old and Christianity is 2,000 years old and that there are different Christian sects, also Islam is younger than Christianity, examples are easy to cite.
The Crusades; the English Reformation; the Balkans ethnic cleansing, Shia vs Sunni, Northern Ireland. It's all politically driven - power.
Yes - humans cause war; but in the name of religion is well documented. Scrap religion and we can tackle other cause of war. Of course we're not going to be able to scrap religion and I predict that in 90 years, we'll all be facing east.
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A little high-level name checking shows that actually, you can’t do as I’ve asked ... you don’t actually understand even the examples you’ve cited. Allow me to elaborate.
The crusades are every pub bore’s go-to. Can I request you read about the
sacking of Constantinople - a Christian city - in the year 1204, during the fourth crusade, before you make simplistic, sub-GCSE assertions about what motivated the young English nobles who went crusading and what they hoped to get out of the exercise.
The English Reformation ... where to begin ... well for starters let me help you out a bit, the Reformation wasn’t English; Protestantism occurred almost everywhere in Europe. It stuck, leading to Reformation, in places where local rulers saw the opportunities inherent in taking control of the influence previously held by the Pope, hence, in the English context, the creation of the Church of England that then allowed Henry VIII to get his divorce. Ordinary people may have been motivated by belief, but it turned violent when their leaders began to seek political advantage. For sure, plenty of blood was shed on the orders of those who believed that heretics must die.
The Balkans ethnic cleansing, well exactly ... ethnic, not religious. The Bosnian part of the conflict, where one side was predominantly Muslim, has lived longest in the memory because of the Srebrenica genocide, but the disintegration of Yugoslavia is the story of the disintegration of an artificial state that held together only as long as strongman Marxists were able to retain control. In any case, as many ethnic Germans were slaughtered in Yugoslavia in the aftermath of World War 2 as the combined total of all Serbs, Croats and Bosnians in the conflicts of the 1990s (130,000 or more). I assumed you’re willing to concede that the Yugoslavs had no need of any religious justification to unofficially carry on the war against those they perceived to be German for some three years after the conflict ended everywhere else.
Yes, there is often a religious component to conflict. As I’ve said, humans will use whatever philosophical justification is at hand in pursuit of power and resources. But “in the name of religion”? I’m not entirely convinced even you know what you mean by that.