Before I even start, let me say that I am not defending Christianity for its past.
Wars over religion are pathetic, true, but so are the majority of the wars that preceded Christianity (in other words everything that's written about from the Greeks, Egyptians, Israelis, Romans (for a time)Babylonians, etc). The near constant warring of the Greeks is probably the best example; it wasn't religious, it was just that the states couldn't stop picking fights with each other. But because they didn't really believe in the cause, they would put down their arms for events like the olympics. There are also practically all of the tribes of Africa, and no one can look at them and say "before Christianity, they were peaceful." Or for that matter, no one can say that the political turmoil on much of that continent has direct religious ties now.
I'm not going to address the crusades, as they represent a time in christianity that one man controlled religious thought for all of western society, and his own personal agendas were subject to being "incorperated" into the religion. Those weren't religious wars, they were just sold as such to most of the European populace. It isn't like that any more in the christian world, and there have not been any major religious wars involving the "Christian" community since the end of the protestant revolution. However, things like colonialism and the large-scale conversion of nomadic or "primative" people have still happened. Islam, on the other hand, has a more definitive tradition of war. There is more basis for the religiously motivated killing in Islam than in other comperable religions, though there are also many mandates against it. However, any time religion is used to justify mass murder I have to at least give it a
. That is not to say that all Muslims believe in holy war, but the religion does seem to have more of a tendency to place more power in the hands of a select few, and it does seem to promote a more primitive culture than most westerners would be willing to live with. I also don't believe that any of the recent wars in the middle east have as much to do with religion as people credit them with... the wars in Iraq were just the US throwing around some of its muscle, the Iraq-Iran war in the 80's was extremely political, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that is going on at the moment is fueled by the fact that both ethnic groups (important distinction) claim that all of the country belongs to them. On this last one I would like to note that there are members of both sides of this issue that have repeatedly forced the religion card, but I do not see prevailing evidence that they represent the populations across the board. The Afghanistan Taliban was the closest to a religious state as has existed in recent times, and we all saw what that was like.
Anyway, what is dangerous for a religion (any religion) is the idea that [evangilist preacher voice] "I am right and I have
God on my side." [/evangilist preacher voice] I've known people like this, they really scare me because it is not possible to get them to look at the other side of the issue, or even to back down from a confrontation.
On a side note, I need to make a graphic that says "StratComm's 2 cents"
