I used to think like that, but have come to realize it's people that caused all that.

There are many different 'tribes', for want of a better name, be they based around religion, nationality, personality cults, even sport, they can be used for good and bad. But it's the leaders, the people, that make that decision.

After all, they may not have gone to war for a Karshadian, but they have for a Trump.

I certainly don't disagree with you, but I think it is still right to blame religion specifically because religion often isn't passive and it's intentionally so. It noticed those traits in humanity you pointed out, and it capitalizes on them through evangelism and then division. Evangelism and then separating you from other groups is built into pretty much all major religions, which is likely why they are still around.

Of course a lot of people don't practice that so much now, there are a lot of passive religious people. But it's built into the fabric of the idea of religion I feel, which is worth criticizing.

> It is still right to blame religion (...) often isn't passive and it's intentionally so. (...) capitalizes on them through evangelism and then division

You singling out religion is saying more about you than it says about religion and religious people.

I don't even need to squint my eyes too much to see how your description still applies to all types of different ideologies - Trotskyists, "being Woke" and Racial Supremacists are all examples that come to mind.

Spare me the personal jab. It's a discussion about organised religion, in which I am criticising it specifically, it doesn't mean I think religion is the lone offender.

Perhaps my using the word "blame" in the grandparent wasn't very clear. I mean blame it specifically for the issues it specifically creates, and not just let it go blame-free because humans would have had wars anyway. Issues such as evangelism in African countries creating religious tensions that wouldn't otherwise exist.

To your more reasonable paragraph, of course it can apply to other ideologies. I am just pointing out that religion is quite a bit more organised than most ideologies, hence it's centuries of success. To be super duper clear, I said more organised than most, this doesn't mean I think other ideologies can't be organised in the same ways.

> Issues such as evangelism in African countries creating religious tensions that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Wars and conflict arise whenever there is a dispute for resources and a power imbalance. You are basically claiming that the different nations and tribes would not get into conflict if it were not for religion? This reeks of "Noble Savage" fallacy.

Also, how many tensions were solved because of evangelism and a shift in cultural/moral values? Can you quantify those?

Plenty of purely religious wars have happened. If you want to defend religion you also need to defend the totality of religion including Aztec human sacrifice, the crusades etc.

The issue with religious justification is it’s effectively random, the only thing you can say is practices that are counterproductive to propitiate a religion die out over time. IE the shakers prohibiting reproduction for everyone not just priests is probably why their not around anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers#Celibacy_and_children

I am not defending religion per se. I am just refuting the affirmation that religion should be blamed for wars that were carried out by people using religion as a justification.

> Plenty of purely religious wars have happened

I'd love to hear examples of those, but let's agree beforehand that a "purely religious war" would be one where there had no conflict over resources or ethnic-national divisions?

If you want a specific example, here’s one of the more interesting ones specifically because it was outside of the kind of institutions that would benefit from winning a war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Crusade

That said, your criteria represent an overly narrow view of history because most possible wars didn’t happen. You need to both gather people into a fighting force and then actually start fighting to have a war so while religion might be a pretext was also quite frequently the cause.

And of course religious violence was often at a much smaller scale than an overt war. Add up smaller conflicts all the way down to stoning someone specific and collectively you have an enormous death total across human history.

From the wikipedia page you linked, on the second paragraph: The peasant population had been afflicted by drought, famine, and disease for many years before 1096, and some of them seem to have envisioned the crusade as an escape from these hardships.

It didn't even take that long to see how religion is mostly a pretext for a war over resources.

> religious violence was often at a much smaller scale (...) collectively you have an enormous death total across human history.

The problem is with violence, not with religion. Lots of people have committed acts of violence due to road rage, their sports teams, jealousy of a love interest and (the internet's favorite) political arguments. To try to blame Religion over the enormous death total is as silly as blaming "Car-Based Transportation", "Football" and "Biology".

That’s really not what that sentence means. It wasn’t that that some people viewed the crusade as a means to gain wealth from the enemy, rather they believed they simply being a soldier as part of an army was an improvement. Considering people had gathered resources to make the trip it was arguably a accurate assessment though they eventually got slaughtered.

The context was: “Calling for a crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II planned the departure of the crusade for 15 August 1096. Nevertheless, a number of unexpected bands of peasants and low-ranking knights organized and set off for Jerusalem on their own.”

Of course this is based on history books written about the time period I haven’t read the associated primary sources. Also, there where a lot of crusades with something of a sliding scale for religious involvement vs other motivations.

> To try to blame Religion over the enormous death total is as silly as blaming "Car-Based Transportation", "Football" and "Biology".

Again human sacrifice, you can exclude plenty of deaths as ethic / religious conflict, but you can’t hit zero. Millions have been sacrificed due to religion not just ethnic conflict. Death or conversion is another thing that shows up regularly.

> you can’t hit zero

I'm not arguing that. My argument is mainly that we shouldn't be attributing to religion all the evil things that happened where religion was only a pretext.

Sure, if that’s your rebuttal and your willing to accept millions, then yea some people will of course blame religion in cases where it’s not at fault.

The inquisition for example gets marginally worse treatment than it deserves. While they did torture many innocent people to death they were sometimes used by others as a means of murder. The death total wasn’t 10’s of millions either. Hell they even regularly let innocent people go

On the other hand some significantly underestimate these evils by insisting on hard evidence of each individual death. Which of course fails when paperwork was lost or was never created, people died from the torture before they could be burned etc.

No I'm not claiming that, you're putting words in my mouth and you're misconstruing my arguments. I have been extremely clear.

As I've had to painstakingly clarify for you, just because I have commented on one thing, does not mean I am subtly making comments about other things. I am being very explicit, very clear. Please read my comments, because I'm not one to bury my lede.

A better way to approach this discussion may have been to ask me questions instead of just assuming answers. You could have asked, "Do you not believe they would have gone to war for other reasons?" to which I would have replied "Of course they likely would have! But it was over religion in this instance."

> it was over religion

And as I've already put in another comment: it's not because religion was the justification for a conflict that we should attribute it to religion.

Many disputes and fights were had over beautiful women. Should we start claiming that women are a problem?

There is a country with over 1 billion people that sorta-kinda breaks your argument. Its leadership is staunchly anti-religion, and I heard they are quite organized.

(They are also responsible for a large number of contemporary violations of human-rights and atrocities going on in the world)

Which is evidence toward the idea that organized groups can do great evil, which was my point about religion. I am not saying that organized religion is the only ideological method to organized people into wrongdoing, just that it is one of them, and it's one of the most effective ones so far.

> organized groups can do great evil, which was my point about religion.

If your point can be made by replacing "religion" with anything that can characterize a group or society, your point is not about religion. You are trying to make a particularization based on a generality.

That is not only a cheap rhetorical trick, it is also the kind of thing that leads to biases, prejudices and "othering", which ironically enough is one of the things that do lead to one of the most effective ways to lead people into polarization and conflicts based on segregation of individuals.

The article is explicitly about religion.

Your last paragraph is certainly true. In the end, how large are those groups compared to religious ones? Catholicism, a sect of Christianity, has 1.2 billion followers alone. Scale matters.

> 1.2 billion followers alone.

How many of those Christians are promoters of human-rights violations? How many self-professed Christians went on to support leaders that used religion to justify wars?

Now tell me how many people still support Communist/Socialist revolutions, even after seeing all this historical bloodbaths that they brought. How many people still praise Che Guevara even after they are made aware of how many people he killed in the name of "justice"? How many people still would support Mao? Pol Pot?

== How many of those Christians are promoters of human-rights violations?==

Any of the ones who put money in a collection plate to help fund the church. Those funds helped pay to cover up human rights abuses. Catholics still support the Vatican, where the leaders live and who were the ones sweeping things under the rug.

== Now tell me how many people still support Communist/Socialist revolutions, even after seeing all this historical bloodbaths that they brought.==

Talk about moving the goalposts. People still praise early Americans for their Revolution. How many did that kill? How many native Americans were slaughtered by the people we lionize?

You know communism and socialism are not the same thing even if you write them next to each other, right? Not to mention that all 1.2 billion Catholics follow the same religion, leadership, and structure. Politics don’t cross the same number of borders.

This game can be played all day. Which is likely what you want because it changes the subject off of religion.

Interesting. You want to assign all blame to the followers of the things you disagree with, but you want to find an excuse to the supporters of the things you agree with.

> Those funds helped pay to cover up human rights abuses.

Possibly true. But the people donating money were not doing it with the intent of "let's help the child molesters go unpunished". On the other hand, I've heard/read from far too many socialists that they fully support Che's actions, or that "those bastards deserved to die."

== but you want to find an excuse to the supporters of the things you agree with.==

We should be aware of our mind’s ability to play this trick. Have you analyzed if you might be falling into this trap? Who is it that I agree with, exactly? I don’t remember stating. It seems you have filled in your own details of who I am and what I believe with a nice straw man that you can attack.

Ironically, I’m struggling to think of a historical figure that was more socialist than Jesus.

== or that "those bastards deserved to die."==

And I’ve heard from plenty of “Christians” that the Crusades were justified, slavery wasn’t that bad, immigrants are rats, Manifest Destiny justifies Native American slaughter, and on and on.

The absurd things that you have heard Christians say are not supported by their leadership. In contrast, there are barbaric actions done by the so-called "heroes" that are defended and even praised by many self-professed socialists.

Don't you see a difference at all?

> The absurd things that you have heard Christians say are not supported by their leadership.

The absurd things that I have heard Christians say (as a Christian myself) have been disproportionately directly from leaders in the Christian community (particularly, but not exclusively, the elites of the American Christian Right, some of whom are also significant figures in one of the remaining heirarchical churches in America.)

That includes the examples specifically cited by the poster upthread.

(There are, of course, other Christian leaders that disagree.)

By "leadership", I meant those that founded and shaped the religion. IOW, the ones that led by example and showing skin in the game. The "leaders" you are referring to are anything but.

This all depends on what you define as “leadership”. I have absolutely heard prominent pastors (local religious leaders) make those claims and I suspect anyone being honest with themselves has too.

When you say leadership are you referring to the leadership who abused small children (local level) or the leadership who covered it up (national/global level)?

The constant “whataboutism” towards socialism doesn’t answer any of those questions. Socialists aren’t a global society like Christians. They don’t have a universal set of instructions to run on (like the Bible). Giving money to a local “socialist” running for office doesn’t trickle up to a global socialist network like the church. You see the difference, no?

> This all depends on what you define as “leadership”.

See comment in sibling thread.

> Socialists aren’t a global society like Christians.

Surely you are joking?

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo_Forum

- http://www.internacionalsocialista.org/viewArticle.cfm?Artic...

May I also point out that the greatest schism in Communist groups is over Leninism/Trotskyism, and how their divergences come exactly from the fact that one of them believes that Communism can only be achieved when (what you call) Socialist practices are applied universally?

> set of instructions to run on (like the Bible).

I let the silly comment about "Jesus being a Socialist" slide, but if you see the Bible as a set of instructions I'd suggest you actually go learn more about Christian Theology and Philosophy before comparing all Christians to fundies.

I grew up Catholic attending Catholic school for 13 years, so that is my reference point. The New Testament was absolutely viewed as instructions from Jesus on how to live a meaningful life. He was showing us how to put God's word into everyday action.

Certainly the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule are instructions on how to live, right?

> May I also point out that the greatest schism in Communist groups is over Leninism/Trotskyism

The Stalinist/Trotskyist split is a split within Leninist-derived Communism, and it hasn't been the “greatest schism” in that community since at.least the rise of Maoism; I’m not sure there are any Trotskyists left (in the US, leading ex-Trotskyists went on to form a significant part of the core of the neoconservative movement.) AFAICT, Leninist-derived Communism is all Stalinist “socialism in one state” now.

The biggest split in Communism (at least, the Marx-derived subset) seems between developed-capitalism first Marxists and Leninist-derived vanguardists, though the former subset is also less tied to old orthodoxy and so has mixed a lot with non-Marxist socialism and is less easy to draw a firm bubble around than the Leninist vanguardists.

You are absolutely correct about /s/Lenin/Stalin. I realized the mistake when it was too late to edit.

I did have my share of discussions with Trotskyists, especially in Europe, so I wouldn't say only stalinists are left nowadays.

> relgion has caused unfathomable turmoil and despair across centuries.

Religion has been used as a justification to cause unfathomable turmoil and despair across centuries. Even if no religion existed, wars and conflict would still exist.