Why do atheists blame religion for war and violence?
Yes, I do agree with you 100%! The examples you gave are just a few we've heard about! There are many more through the ages who have sacrificed everything for the sake of their faith in God. Especially, their lives! People who have done great things because of their beliefs and yet, the go unknown because it is not a boastful thing to be a servant. It is humbling, it is as it is meant to be. Indeed, if more people stepped up like Mother Teresa and other people of peace, this world would be a totally different place. I agree with this statement:" I will bet my bottom dollar that without religion, more wars, more violence, would have occurred throughout the ages, and more people would have died, more violently." You are exactly correct!!
Why do people blame religion (especially Christianity) for war?
Absolutely not. War is merely greed writ large. That having been said, religion is often used as a pretext and as a way of uniting a people against another. Some of the worst atrocities in war can be laid at the doorstep of the religious idea that the enemy is the enemy of whatever god, and those atrocities are often committed by ardent believers, but the religion itself is only to blame for being too easy and too eager a tool of demonizing other humans. Without religion to unite the various warring tribes of the Mid East and the various warring kingdoms of Europe, would the crusades have happened? Maybe, maybe not. The struggle for control of resources and trade routes would have gone on, surely, but perhaps on a smaller and less organized scale. Without the differences in faith, would the Serbs have raped and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bosnians? Maybe. But it's doubtful that the soldiers would have felt so self-righteous while raping female children. But since they were unbelievers, and thus enemies of god, it became easier for the Serb soldiers to treat the Bosnian Muslims as less than human.
Is religion to blame for most wars in the world?
I wouldn't say so in the past, but extreme religious views seem to be the root cause of war in modern times. The way I see it, although I do realise it's not this simple, is that in the past wars were fought for land and power. Now wars are fought against people. Not one country fighting against another for land, but one group of people trying to destroy another group of people. I guess this started with Hitler in WW2. I think the new kind of war is far more disturbing. Sure, war has never been great, but in the past people went to war without thinking. It was simply their duty to their country. Now people's religious beliefs lead them to fight wars with intentions of destroying PEOPLE. It's a scarey though, what is becoming of humanity.
Why do people always blame religion to wars?
i always find small-minded people who think they know it all say that religion is evil and because of it our planet is savaged by wars. I say complete nonsense, this is just people who are unwilling or simply not bothered to learn history. The most famous case would have to be the arab-israeli conflict people instantly blame religion for it failing to look at the tribal context of it and also the ownership and control of territory. The silliness of it is like me saying that Lenin was a strong atheist therefore atheism is pure and utter evil because it lead to the murder and massacre of million. These sweeping statements are nonsense and it exactly the same for the argument of religion being the cause of wars.
I think you are traveling the wrong road to get an answer to that question. The real key is in how one defines religion.Only states can go to war. That might seem like an obvious point, but it often gets entirely overlooked. Religions don't have armies. If a 'religion' has an army it is not longer a religion, but a state that has appropriated religion for political purposes.European history is essentially the history of the state using religion to legitimize the right of the rulers over the ruled. Martin Luther's trip to Rome completely disabused him of any remaining conceptions he might of had of the Roman Catholic church being a religion. His ambivalence about his own excommunication makes this abundantly clear--in his view, the Church was a political entity, with no divine authority to bless or to curse.The American constitution and it's prohibition against the establishment of a state religion is largely an acknowledgment of the problems this has caused for humanity.One more interesting point--modern science, and our entire western civilization was made possible by the Greeks and their evolving out of mythology to philosophy. Why among all the great civilizations of their era, did only the Greeks evolve philosophy?Because only the Greeks, among all the contemporary civilizations, failed to institutionalize religion as an appendage of the state.Greek religion, left as a person devotion, evolved naturally into science, even as the corrupting influence of politics IN religion, has retarded intellectual and technological development. Although Islam benefited greatly from their absorption of exhausted empires of the west, their technological development ended with their successful conquests. Islamic time-keeping technology was did not progress from water clocks (invented before the common era) for centuries while Europeans produced increasing smaller and more accurate clocks. European clocks were introduced to the Ottomans who viewed them as curiosities, because aside from determining the time of prayers, they had no need of such devices. Considering how important time-keeping was to become for virtually every modern technology, that was a serious gap in the technological development of Islamic peoples.Politics, not religion, is a corrupting influence, destroying all it touches.
Why do people blame religion?
Yes, people get simplistic (and think it profound) when they blame religion. You are quite correct. Humans are capable of utilizing ALL SORTS of excuses for evil. Why don't people simply blame PEOPLE. Obviously PEOPLE are the cause of wars. If we want to argue the ways in which people do evil, we can blame a huge list of people phenomena: science, politics, greed, anger, envy, ego, ethnic supremacy, religious supremacy, group-think-supremacy (basically ANY excuse for seeing the world as "We are good but THEY are BAD." Of course, the we/they can easily be based on skin color or national pride or religious pride or ideological pride......so why pick on religion? I was a religious studies professor for much of my life. One thing I learned long ago is that people who know the LEAST about religion seem to be the most sure that it is to blame for everything. As many of the answers simplified it: "Read the Bible. It justifies wars." Yes, I'm sure that they are all budding religious studies scholars that have it all figured out. Of course, the same people will also generalize and say "religious people are anti-education and are ignorant" -- but just try to get them to compare curriculum vitae or admit that they never had tenure for their academic chair. This R&S forum seems to have a great many of the kind of know-it-all freshman atheist who comes into the Intro to Religious Studies class as the only self-proclaimed "genius" in the class, the one who is going to teach the professor and all of his/her classmate the same kinds of nonsense that the simpletons post here to put down "inferior religious people" and "fundies". I enjoy these forums for the raw data and quotable quotes to be mined her from such people. Best wishes on your neuroscience career and keep up the common sense use of your brain.
A good question- one might easily argue that in most cases, religion is a front for more earthly motives. Without Christianity, say, the crusaders would have found some other excuse to try and claim the middle east. It was really about land disputes.And maybe. Or maybe it was really about religion. Or about power struggles in the European nobility and church. Or about the Byzanite empire trying to reclaim its power. Or about Pope Urban the Second’s politicking. Or about atrocities committed in Jerusulum. Or countless other factors that went into a massive complex web that started a war.Wars rarely have one cause that you can point to, and trying to entangle just how much religion affected things is near impossible, especially once something is out of living memory.Suffice it to say, there is no shortage of people who claim their wars were inspired by religion, and little reason to doubt they are at least partly honest. There are people who killed because of religion, who wouldn’t have without it.How many, perhaps, is up for dispute, but that religion has inspired evil is not.
Why Blame Christianity for War?
Christianity is not the only faith to be involved in wars. THE ISLAMIC CONQUESTS- Killed just as many (if not more) than the Crusades. EASTERN ISLAMIC SLAVE TRADE- 1.25 million European (white) slaves & approx 140 million African slaves (a lot more than Western slavery) More people are killed by Islamists each & every year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined. So that's 350 years worth of Christian killings committed by Muslims every year! the Algerian Civil war where Muslims hacked-up 110,000 non-Muslims and the Muslims who are slaughtering and enslaving Africans in Darfur and much more in the East today. Islamists murder more people everyday than the Ku Klux Klan has in the last 50 years. More civilians were killed by Muslim extremists in two hours on September 11th than in the 36 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. 19 Muslim hijackers killed more innocents in two hours on September 11th than the number of American criminals executed in the last 65 years. And lets not forget that most recent wars have had nothing to do with religion.
It's because many people use the word 'religion' incorrectly. I'll substitue 'worldview' for 'religion', since everyone has a worldview, even atheists. The point being that blaming a worldview on anything is not rational without refering to which worldview one is refering. The worldview of the Islamo-Terrorists is that it is OK to murder in God's name. Most people find this repulsive.My worldview, based upon Christ's teachings is that the way we should treat others is to:1) Love all others, even our enenies.2) Treat others as we would like to be treated.3) Use your talents to make the world a better place. This worlview is hard to beat!So my bottom line is that people are responsible for their own actions. and if they adopt a harmful worldview, they are responsible for the consequences of that as well.