Does Religion Cause War?
In part one of this discussion, we established that many of the wars of the past century were not religious in nature and their motivation was in fact about as non-religious as one could get. Religion is not the common denominator of all war. Nor, for that matter is atheism. We should really extend our original question to “does religion also cause terrorism, torture or indeed any acts that violate the life, liberty and human rights of the individual?” Recent history tells us pretty emphatically that while religion has often been used as an excuse for barbaric conduct, men inclined towards act of barbarism have found other justifications as well as religion to make their slaughter of their fellow human beings appear perfectly reasonable or “unavoidable.” Hitler’s ethnic cleansing, for example, actually had “science” as its excuse – the bogus science of Eugenics. The fact that religion is used as an EXCUSE for an atrocity is no more a reason to condemn religion than the use by the unscr
