By: Right Wire Report author Liam Salvatore
How often have we heard the old refrain that religion is the cause of most wars? Personally, I’ve heard it many times and believed it for much of my life. It’s kind of like the old quote attributed to Nazi Joseph Goebbels and others – “If a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes truth.” In the case of religion as the catalyst for most wars, it’s a repeated misconception rather than a lie. However, I’m sure there are militant atheists and other opponents of religion who know it’s not true but gleefully lie about it anyway.
Phillips and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia Of Wars examined five thousand years of warfare and discovered a conclusion that is the opposite of popular belief. Out of 1,763 wars fought between 8000BC and 2000AD, only 123, or 7%, were religious in nature. Another scholarly source, The Encyclopedia of War, confirms the Philips and Axelrod data and puts the number at 6%. Other texts, such as The Myth of Religious Violence, denounces the fake claim that most wars were of a religious nature. A 2014 report from the Institute for Economics and Peace concurs with prior findings that religion is not the primary cause of most of history’s wars.
The obvious inference drawn from the data is that the vast majority of wars of history were secular (non-religious). Two studies by R.J. Rummel, Lethal Politics and Death by Government into the nature of warfare, find that non-religious wars have killed over 100 million in the 20th century alone. The tyrannical and murderous rule of despots such as Mao Zedong during China’s cultural revolution, Hitler’s reign of terror in World War 2, and others make it quite clear that religion is not the primary reason for the body count of war. The following graphic reveals the carnage.
The radical progressive authors of today’s equity rules have a list of groups on the protected list. Religion, particularly Christianity, does not make the cut, which is apparent in the constant attacks we see on religious rights in this country. There is little effort to dispel the myth that religion is the root of all warfare, so many remain unaware of the truth, and those hostile to the church weaponize this fake history.
I am not particularly religious and rarely attend church, but I recognize persecution and fallacy when I see it, or in this case, when I hear the false refrain – “Religion is the cause of most wars.”
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Source: Sunday Thoughts: Religion Is Not The Primary Cause Of War Contrary To Fake Memes
