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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: No Religion= Peace
« on: July 16, 2017, 12:19:51 PM »Before people start fighting me over the subject, I first want to say that actually I am a Christian and I go to church every Sunday and participate in many of the church's activities. However, I am really convinced that if we go back the moment humans were created on this earth, and take away every religion, there will be world peace... I don't know about you but I would really love to know your opinions.
I have to disagree with you.
Historically speaking, we cannot attribute as much of the conflict and violence in recorded human history to religious differences as is typically assumed. One can look at an obvious example of religious war, such as the First Crusade, and look at how differences in religion were used to start that conflict.
On the other hand, the largest conflicts and outbreaks of violence are usually caused by political and social factors. For example, we can look at World War I. Most of the nations involved in the "war to end all wars" nominally had some denomenation of Christianity as their official state religion, but there were also countries and empires involved that were predominantly Muslim or Hindu. The outbreak of total war between 1914 and 1918 wasn't precipitated by religion. Instead, rampant nationalism (mostly in Western Europe) from the late 1800s onwards had created a situation where widespread conflict was almost entirely sure to break out at some point. The war that broke out after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand occured because of diplomatic, political, and nationalist choices.
As far as religiously-motivated violence and conflict go, I'm sure that many of the commentators before me have mentioned that religion is often just used as an excuse to justify someone's actions. In far too many of the cases where people blame religion, they're using it as a convenient excuse to get away, quite literally, with murder. If we didn't have religion, they'd be blaming ethnicity, race, language, economics, politics, social traditions, or any of the other myriad things that people use to differentiate themselves.