Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international bloodshed.
Scott Atran, atheist and anthropologist
2 comments:
I wouldn't give the Crusades a 5. Maybe for many individual participants, but overall (at the state level) they were a struggle over who got control of the Mediterranean Sea. Let's call it a 3.
Starhopper said...
"I wouldn't give the Crusades a 5. Maybe for many individual participants, but overall (at the state level) they were a struggle over who got control of the Mediterranean Sea. Let's call it a 3."
I will give a 3 too, for that reason, and that they don't go to those lands to convert the general population only to change the goverment body. Christianity utilitarian value in those times was for the recruitment of personnel, meat/pesants for the war, you know just cause/reason for them to put their lifes in the line.
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