There is a lot of disinformation on this thread!
"Almost every war in the history of the world was fought over religious beliefs." is simply wishful thinking.
Most of the massive wars and genocides reaching millions of victims each have been about atheist ideologists, race hatred, or simply grabbing land or territory. There are too many to mention, but aside from nazi holocaust, the soviets are responsible for millions too, the chinese cultural revolution, tibet and the rest, pol pots regime in cambodia, but even less heard of conflicts like the tutsi./ hutu conflict in rwanda responsible for millions of lives, and the congo next door even worse. So very few lives have been lost in religious conflicts in comparison. It is not even true of wars. Of the several hundred wars fought in europe in the middle ages, a third or less had a religious overtone.
As for the biggest threat, ISIS is the best funded terrorist regime in history, it has by some estimates hundreds of millions in assets, and oil from a lot of syria and iraq, that buys a lot of weapons. It occupies an area bigger than britain, so I think the numbers of 10000 terrorists is way under.what is needed to control that. I am guessing they are into 6 figures Considering the soviet union black market, weapons trading and the inability to account for a lot of post war plutonium, and some level of complicity in turkey, saudi and elsewhere, ISIS are a massive threat.
And none of the nations seems to have the resolve to do anything about it. I am reminded of one of churchills speeches, "air parity lost" before the war, saying by the time they acted it had all got out of hand..
"When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure.
There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline Books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong -these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."
To be sure, many conflicts throughout history have been ostensibly for religious reasons, with many different religions involved. For example, in Christianity, there occurred (just to name a few):
• The Crusades — A series of campaigns from the 11th to the 13th centuries with the stated goal of reconquering the Holy Land from Muslim invaders and coming to the aid of the Byzantine Empire
• The French Wars of Religion — A succession of wars in France during the 16th century between Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots
• The Thirty Years' War — Another war between Catholics and Protestants during the 17th century in what is now Germany
This list is by no means exhaustive. In addition to this, one could add the Taiping Rebellion and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Christianity has certainly been a factor in many conflicts throughout its 2,000-year history.
In Islam, we see the concept of
jihad, or “holy war.” The word
jihad literally means “struggle,” but the concept has been used to describe warfare in the expansion and defense of Islamic territory. The almost continual warfare in the Middle East over the past half century certainly has contributed to the idea that religion is the cause of many wars. The September 11 attacks on the United States has been seen as a jihad against the “Great Satan” America, which in Muslim eyes is almost synonymous with Christianity. In Judaism, the wars of conquest chronicled in the OT (in particular the book of Joshua) at the command of God, conquered the Promised Land.
The point should be obvious that religion has certainly played a part in much of the warfare in human history. However, does this prove the point made by the critics of religion that religion itself is the cause of war? The answer is “yes” and “no.” “Yes” in the sense that as a secondary cause, religion, on the surface at least, has been the impetus behind much conflict. However, the answer is “no” in the sense that religion is never the
primary cause of war.
To demonstrate this point, let’s look at the 20th century. By all accounts, the 20th century was one of the bloodiest centuries in human history. Two major world wars, which had nothing at all to do with religion, the Jewish Holocaust, and the Communist Revolutions in Russia, China, Southeast Asia and Cuba, have accounted for anywhere between 50-70 million deaths (some estimate upwards to 100 million). The one thing these conflicts and genocides have in common is that fact that they were ideological, not religious, in nature. We could easily make the case that more people have died throughout human history due to ideology than to religion. Communist ideology necessitates ruling over others. Nazi ideology necessitates elimination of “inferior” races. These two ideologies alone account for the death of millions, and religion had nothing to do with it. In fact, communism is by definition an atheistic ideology.
Religion and ideology are both secondary causes for war. However, the primary cause for
all war is sin. Consider the following Scriptures:
“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (
James 4:1-3).
