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How Many Wars Are Really Caused by Religion? (& other questions) READ FIRST POST!

Litovoi, while some of your points may be overstated, you bring up an oft-forgotten point: Muhammad did an awful lot of fighting for the founder of a "religion of peace."

Most wars are caused by religion or somehow connected to religion, but they are also the ones that are usually not the most bloody. More likely they are wars that don't last long.
This is the very reason this issue has so easily reached the point of a straw man--people don't give sources and they exaggerate. (However, saying that these wars are less bloody is certainly not a straw man exaggeration. I applaud that statement, even if I can't confirm it.)

Most wars have a much larger political element than religious. Take the Romans. You know. the ones who conquered people. And killed them. They fought because...they wanted to conquer.


How is that so few people have actually decided to debate this issue, yet it pops up in just about every general religion debate?
 

7 tyranitars

Well-Known Member
Wars are usualy caused by, greed/expension,politcal tension or religion, sometimes multiple of them. Ofcourse there are wars that had another cause, but that something is supposly peacefull causes so many wars, isn't really a good thing. However thanks to religion-themed wars my country is independant so yeah.. However what people usualy seem to link at wars is violance in general, like the troubles in Northern Ireland, or muslim terrorists. (the latter one can be seen as a war, War on Terror)

How many wars are caused by religion.. honestly I wouldn't know, not gonna take the effort to count them.

One thing that catches my eye is that if a war has religion as a cause the aftermath seem to be a bit harsher then your usual war. And (not counting WW2) it seem to have a high rate of genocide, or atleast torture/forcefully converting people to the religion who won the war.
 
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Litovoi

Astral Shadow
Many wars have some bearing on religion, as most disagreements come from that and race. People from other races and religions are different, and so that causes arguments.

And yes, the Romans conquered because they wanted to. Not all wars are religious.
 

Power464646

The game
There was one started by Henry VIII...
 

Bill Nye the Sneasel Guy

Well-Known Member
Religion is used to justify a lot of wars, I'm not sure if it would be the cause of all that many. Even wars considered blatantly religious in character tend to be somewhat more complex than 'they believe something different so therefore I need to shank them,' if you look closely. The Thirty Year's War, for example, you'll see that the pope was awfully concerned about those Lutherans and such not paying their tithes in a time where the papacy was really into collecting money for huge architecture and art projects, and that Catholic France saw few problems in joining the Protestants to go against Austria. However, I won't deny that the idea of 'extirpating the heresy' was still very prominent.
 

Dragontamer1011

Well-Known Member
You really didn't mention the motivations behind each persons action. Most of them were caused by a religious belief, ideal, or disagreement between them.
 
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