Would there have been war if religion hadn't come in being ?

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Hearing about what's going on in Israel and Palestine is really terrible and it just seems like once that religions are the cause behind the mindless bloodshed that's going on as well as politics and other issues. I seem to feel like there are too many conflicts going on at the moment, one in Ukraine, one in Sudan, one in Israel and Gaza and others that I don't know about right now. I've sometimes pondered the question sometimes on whether the world would have been peaceful if religions hadn't come about. I'm sorry if this may seem like a controversial question to ask. I wonder what the founders of many world religions would have thought if they had seen the world we are living in right now, seeing their devoted followers being at peace one minute and then the next tearing each other to pieces in their name as they have done for thousands of years.

There would still be wars even if religion didnt exist.

Folks would fight over resources, secular political ideologies, etc. Just greed.

In traditional China they didnt have this notion that you had to be just one religion. You could be Taoist, Confucianist, and Buddhist, at the same time.

So in traditional China they rarely had "wars of religion" the way they did have Europe and in the Middle East for the last two thousand years.

But far eastern countries including China still managed to have wars anyway.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 11 Oct 2023, 5:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Humans would just find some other excuse to kill each other. Humans are like that Aesop's Fable where a wolf tries to come up with an excuse to devour a helpless baby lamb, so he says "You called me a nasty name last year, so I'm going to eat you now", but the lamb tells him, "That can't be true because a year ago I wasn't born". And then wolf says, "Okay, but you when you drank from the same river I was drinking from the other day you made the water on my side go muddy," and then the lamb says, "That can't be true either, because I've only been drinking my mother's milk." And *then* the wolf says, "Fine, then it was your mother who made the water muddy!" and then he pounced on the lamb and ate her up. But before she died she cried out, "When someone is evil they will always find an excuse". Or something like that.

But real wolves aren't evil, humans are. And vicious. And stupid. And they will always find an excuse to hate and kill.

Abso-fuckin'-loutely.

Apes were engaged in organized violence long before they invented organized religion.

Pretty sure wolves also engage in violence against other wolves (from other packs) that strongly resembles primitive warfare among humans or chimps. They desire control over resources and they'll use deadly force to achieve that goal. This use of force is organized and also isn't limited to only potential threats.

When they choose violence, it's on-sight and premeditated.

I know you're a misanthropist, but a lot of your hostility towards humanity seems misplaced and misinformed.

How am I misanthropic ?

Not you, you're not the poster I quoted.

You don't consistently express a hatred of humanity in the bulk of your posts so I have no reason to believe you're a misanthropist.

Resources, discrimination and territorial disputes are just a few of the many things that people kill other people over, sometimes on a large scale and where two or more 'sides' are at war with one another.

None of which has to do with religion.

Sure, religion can cause a war, but the biggest wars in terms of total kills, including the world wars, were not religious wars.

Hitler for example, largely responsible for world war two, was a self proclaimed atheist (though he supported the occult somewhat, at the behest of his commanders and other Nazis).

Absolutely there would have been war. Territory, food, bruised Royal egos - there's always been multiple causes of war

There’d certainly be wars but, perhaps, fewer wars.

Hitler was not an atheist. That is a myth.

https://richarddawkins.net/2015/01/refu ... tler-myth/

As someone pointed out Hitler was not a self proclaimed atheist, and even if it had been secular ideologies had replaced religions as "the religions" to fight over in the 20th century (Nazism, Communism, Democracy, and Fascism, are all secular creeds).

We seem to be moving back into fighting over religion nowadays.


Many of the bloodiest wars in human history were in the name of religion.
Europe was bathed in the many genocidal wars sparked by the Protestant Reformation during the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. The Thirty Years (a Europe-wide war fought between Catholic powers and Protestant powers)of 1618 to 1648 was worse than WWII relative to the population of Europe at the time.

The bloodiest civil war in history, and the second bloodiest war of any kind in human history, was the Taiping Rebellion in China in the mid 19th Century. Was led by a David Koresh type cult leader, who got introduced to Christianity by European missionaries, who later convinced himself that he was "the younger brother of Jesus Christ", who led uprising against the Manchu rulers of China in the name of his distorted version of Christanity. It spread like wildfire thoughout China. French and British armies had to be called in to help crush the nation wide rebellion that took millions of lives. Worse than the First World War, and second only to the Second World War in absolute numbers of deaths.

I think religion can be a factor, but that war is mainly caused by politics and leaders, and if there's a religion handy, they might twist it to help their efforts to get ordinary people to fight. Man created God in his own image, and violent men create violent gods.

The Troubles in Ireland were often said to be down to religious hatred, but I think it was more down to the fact that the English took Ireland off the Irish and imported a lot of Scottish Protestants to beat the Irish into submission.

I think the Arab-Israeli conflict is rooted in the fact that they destroyed Israel and the Arab elite ended up with the land. Then, after many hundreds of years when the Arab elite were used to having the place, they re-created Israel and kicked the Arabs out. I think it's all about squabbling over land. Not surprisingly, the Arabs want it back. Before modern Israel was founded, a lot of Jews owned land there, and the Arabs didn't particularly mind.

Regarding the question in the title of the thread, well - you've sort of answered it in your opening post.

It would be pretty difficult to make the case that the war in Ukraine is a religious one. It should surely instead be viewed as either a proxy conflict between the Russian and US Empires, or an ethnic conflict between Russians and Ukrainians, or a mixture of the two.

I would say the conflict between Israel and Gaza is more of an ethnic conflict than a religious one, although religion clearly plays more of a part than it does with the war in Ukraine.

On the topic of antisemitism, I have been reading a translated version of a collection of Shakespeare stories. I was somewhat surprised at the bluntness of the prejudice in one of the tales. Where a man, who is often referred to as 'the jew' or 'the Jewish merchant' is told to redeem himself - this is referred to in the story as him 'becoming a Christian'.

I don't know how accurate this translation is, however it is interesting that being Christian is seen as a redemption and the fact that he is Jewish is seen as automatically bad. As if it's a character flaw rather than a religion or an ethnic group.

Of course I expected the tales to reflect the social climate of Shakespeare's time, but it was still a jarring read. Goes to show that such prejudice dates back considerably in the world.

I didn't know that people were claiming Hitler to be an atheist, a claim which seems unlikely. Personally I remember learning in History class about Nazi Germany playing on the pre-existing antisemitism of the Christian public at the time. I think that it would be disingenuous to present the movement as entirely disconnected from religion.

However, it's also a little more complex. There was also pseudoscience which was used to dehumanise and justify the treatment of Jewish people.

Of course that's not to say that Christianity is inherently evil. That would be terribly reductionist.

Back to the question of this thread - no. One man's call to war is another man's reason for peace. Any ideology, no matter how well intended to begin with, can be deadly in the wrong hands if enough influence over others is obtained.

So long as humans want something: resources, land, power, you name it - there will be violence and bloodshed.

Citing Richard Dawkins is pretty weak. Outside of his Christianity bashing that pleases atheists, he isn't a particularly notable figure.

As far as I am aware, Hitler's professed views more or less in line with atheism, at least by the end of his life, with influences from Hinduism at one point.

He was raised a Catholic Christian but disregarded his given faith throughout his life, and expressed these sentiments towards the people in his professional life.

From the Wikipedia article entitled Religious views of Adolf Hitler:

"The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political life, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards Christianity. Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations."

Also:

"Martin Bormann, who was serving as Hitler's private secretary, persuaded Hitler to allow a team of specially picked officers to record in shorthand his private conversations for posterity. Between 1941 and 1944, Hitler's words were recorded in transcripts now known as Hitler's Table Talk.The transcripts concern not only Hitler's views on war and foreign affairs, but also his characteristic attitudes on religion, culture, philosophy, personal aspirations, and his feelings towards his enemies and friends. Speer noted in his memoirs that Bormann relished recording any harsh pronouncements made by Hitler against the church: "there was hardly anything he wrote down more eagerly than deprecating comments on the church". Within the transcripts, Hitler speaks of Christianity as "absurdity" and "humbug" founded on "lies" with which he could "never come personally to terms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler

Last edited by blitzkrieg on 18 Oct 2023, 9:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.