How many wars started over religion

Armies go into battle believing that God is with them, often after prayers and sacrifices to keep God on their side. In tribal cultures including Biblical ones when a people lose a war they often have to change to the worship of the winner's gods. However involving God as part of the campaign does not make a war a holy war - for a war to be a holy war, religion has to be the driving force. Many of the wars fought in the name of religion do conform to the just war conditions, but not all of them.

Francis Bacon said there were five causes for holy war: he wrote in a Christian context, but the categories would be usable by any faith. Only the first of these causes is completely outside the scope of the conventional idea of a just cause. Some of the other causes, because of the length of time that can pass since the offending act took place are probably not just causes either.

The legitimate authority for a holy war is not the government of a state except in a theocracy but the Church, or the relevant organisation or person who heads the religious institution concerned.

In ancient times the authority was often God - in the Bible there are several occasions where God gave direct instructions to peoples to wage war. This would not be the case today. The third condition of a holy war is a spiritual reward for those who take part.

The doctrine of the just war does not refer to any personal rewards for the participants - and such rewards would be against such a generally austere doctrine. The first holy war was probably in October CE when the Roman emperor Constantine saw a vision of the cross in the sky with this inscription "in hoc signo vinces" in this sign you will win.

Constantine trusted the vision and had the cross inscribed on his soldiers' armor. Even though his forces were outnumbered, he won the battle against an army that was using pagan enchantment. Historians regard this as a turning point in Christianity's fortune. The great series of western holy wars were the Crusades, which lasted from until CE. In his hilarious analysis of The 10 Commandments, George Carlin said to loud applause, "More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason," and many take this idea as an historical fact.

When I hear someone state that religion has caused most wars, though, I will often and ask the person to name these wars. The response is typically, "Come on! Need I name more? Well, yes, we do need to name more, because while clearly there were wars that had religion as the prime cause, an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict.

In their recently published book, "Encyclopedia of Wars," authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of wars only have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare.

While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3, in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone. History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority.

In fact, the ancient conquerors, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman, openly welcomed the religious beliefs of those they conquered, and often added the new gods to their own pantheon.

Medieval and Renaissance wars were also typically about control and wealth as city-states vied for power, often with the support, but rarely instigation, of the Church. And the Mongol Asian rampage, which is thought to have killed nearly 30 million people, had no religious component whatsoever.

While religious groups have been specifically targeted most notably in World War II , to claim that religion was the cause is to blame the victim and to misunderstand the perpetrators' motives, which were nationalistic and ethnic, not religious. Similarly, the vast numbers of genocides those killed in ethic cleanses, purges, etc.

It's estimated that over million civilians were killed in genocides in the 20th century alone, with nearly million killed by the Communist states of USSR and China. He knew that the answer to oppression and violence was not less Christianity, but a deeper and truer Christianity. A Christianity that transcended their cultural and political associations. Greg Koukl points out that. Nothing in Christian teaching itself mandates forcible conversion to the faith or coerced adherence to Biblical doctrines.

The teachings of Christ do not lead logically to wanton bloodshed. This has been the foundation for Christian ethics for 2, years. In regards to the claim that religion has been the biggest source of oppression and war in human history, the facts may surprise you. The three volume Encyclopedia of Wars , which records some 1, wars that have been waged over the course of human history categorize only as being religious in nature.

This is only 6. The percentage is less than half that, at 3. The relationship between religion and war, which skeptics have depicted, is in stark contrast to the facts. Despite this reality, people like Richard Dawkins, who in his book The God Delusion , claim that w ithout religion there would be no labels by which to decide whom to oppress and whom to avenge.

Critics of religion continue to make such claims which allude to religion as the ultimate factor responsible for world oppression and violence, and in doing so seem to insinuate that it in some way has anything to do with the coherence of the religious view.

This, however, begs the question of what the cause actually is. The number of people who perished in religious conflicts pales in comparison to the slaughter and butchery which has taken place under non-religious leaders.

Ideas have consequences, and in the 20 th century they contributed to the democide of an unprecedented number of people. From to , in a span of under 70 years, roughly ,, human beings were murdered by these government regimes. Almost million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of a myriad of ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.

The dead could conceivably be nearly million people. It is though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs. The cause, of course, goes deeper than political dogma or philosophical ideology.