Religion and Violence

August 29, 2008

In the early stages of human existence, during the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, tens of thousands of religious wars were fought. However, we will never know a thing about them because they went unrecorded due to the absence of writing in those archaic times.

In more recent eras, such as the last two thousand years, there have been countless violent conflicts between different creeds. Fortunately, those were well documented.

The first confrontation between Christianity and Islam occurred in 645, when the newly formed Muslim armies tried to overrun the Byzantine Empire. Then came the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, then the Crusades, then the conquering drive of the Ottoman Turks into the Mediterranean, then the push of Czarist Russia into Ottoman territories, then the imperialist drive of Europe into the Middle East, and then the War on Terror.

The first clash between Judaism and Christianity took place two thousand years ago, but soon the new religion consolidated its power in Europe and since then it instigated official and unofficial pogroms against the Jews. The most costly in human lives was the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century. That inter-creed confrontation experienced no respite and continued into the twentieth century, when Nazi Germany pursued to exterminate the Jews and the Vatican showed sympathy for what the fascists were doing. The Orthodox Christians were hardly any different from their Western counterparts and in Russia there were numerous religiously inspired anti-Jewish pogroms.

Since the death of Mohammed in 632, Muslim armies systemically expanded the territories under their control and in the early sixteenth century they took over northern India. That obviously translated into a clash with Hindu armies. The warring among Islam and Hinduism continued in the following centuries and not even when Britain ruled the subcontinent, did it stop. That is why in 1947, when the British granted independence, the Muslims demanded that India be broken up so that they could have a nation of their own. Despite the territorial partition, as soon as the British withdrew, a war erupted and in the decades that followed there were two others.

Hinduism and Islam are the two largest religions of South Asia, but there are others and violence among them has also been regular. In India, there have been constant clashes throughout the centuries between Sikhs and Hindus, Animists and Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and in between other confessions.

In Sri Lanka, Buddhists and Hindus have fought for centuries and since 1983 a brutal civil war has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

The above are just some of the numerous long term religious confrontations that the world has witnessed in the past two millennia, but there have been many more.

What history shows is that religions inherently drive people towards violence. To argue that it is not religion per se the one perpetrating the violence, is the equivalent of saying that lions and bears are not intrinsically brutal. To assert that it is men and not the belief in God what drive people towards violence, is the same as saying that if there were no humans on Earth, there would be no war. Of course there would be no war if the planet was uninhabited.

Such statements are as inconsistent as saying that the addition of two and two is a thousand. But that should not surprise us because that is how religious people argue. Their world is one of convoluted ideas and their reasoning lacks all logic and all coherence. A person must have a very chaotic brain to dare say that thousands of years in which all religions constantly drove nations into war, is not an indication of their inherent violent nature.

netinfoseek.com | edit