> 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.