Throughout History, What are the most violent religions?

Question

Please think broad on this, and try and see it from both viewpoints, ie. those considered violent and those that have been victimized.

Answer 1

Christianity ranks highly with the Crusades, what happened in the Inquisition and things currently as many parts of Christianity has Zionism integrated which is largely to blame for the current middle east situation.
Islam is the youngest and hasnt had a long time to up the body count. I have read a significant portion of the Koran and there is some pretty violent talk in there. Its critical to remember if all you read of the Bible was Deuteronomy or if thats what your particular church focuses on you would have a radically different view from a group that only read the Book of John.
Hindu the oldest and polytheistic has plenty of room for interpretation and they have had plenty of wars.
Judaism basically the old testament is a book of blood as indicated above.
Buddhism likely plenty Vietnam has quite a bit of this, as well as India, Japan

Answer 2

If you are talking about all history, then the most violent religions are the three Spawns of Jehovah; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity has a particularly violent history and those considered "heretics," like the Gnostics, were some of their many victims. Judaism itself is based on violence. Read the Old Testament, it is vile in it's violence against innocent victims. Judaism probably has the most victims if you include the flood, and the fact that it gave birth to it's two other violent siblings. Islam is a very violent religion as well. I find it less than ironic that the Old Testament god calls himself "a man of war." I don't think it is any coincidence that it is the three Spawns of Jehovah that are at war with one another in the Middle East. All three have very vile and violent histories.

Answer 3

Religions aren't violent, the people that bend and twist religion to their own ends are violent.
The best, but possibly the least-seen movie dealing with religious conflict is James Clavell's the Last Valley, which not only treats the subject adroitly through the lens of the Thirty Years' war, but features amazing performances by Omar Shariff and Michael Caine.

Answer 4

Christianity, by far; none of the others are even close. Over a quarter of a million people have been slaughtered in the inglorious history of the church, although the rate declined somewhat after the Thirty Years War. It was not unitl about 1820 that the worst of the Catholic abominations (inquisition, auto-da-fe, and the like) were finally put to rest.

Answer 5

Anyone who is religious can point the finger at any other religion, but wants to deny their own religion's violent acts of the past. Truth of the matter, there are always people killing in the name of their God. Since almost every religion preaches peace, these people are all radicals from their respective faiths and should not be used to judge the rest of the religion.

Answer 6

Those who sacrifice the living to the gods believing that it will effect the weather, food crops or anything else they dream up or imagine.I think that often religion and claims it was their gods commands by higher authorities was used as a tool to control the masses with fear and paranoia of their gods retribution. Making religion a supernatural pawn and not the real motive behind it all. Religions and people are exploited so religion is not the real motive or to blame, it's politics of power hungry governments.

Answer 7

Christianity, Islam, and the ancient Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian religions, the Mayan and Aztec religions. Pretty much all of them, but not quite. They're all victimized each other and everyone else.

Answer 8

That's an impossible question to answer definitively - although it makes for interesting debate and essay topics. It's not possible to answer for several reasons:

- how do you define violence?

- how to categorise behaviour that we would nowadays consider violent but was acceptable within the context of the time (e.g slavery ... stoning to death a disobedient child, etc.)

- would you want to differentiate between violence towards people of your own religion and violence towards people of other religions?

- then there's the subdivisions within different religions, so that within Christianity as a religion we have violence between Catholics and Protestants, within Islam there's violence between Shia and Sunni, and so on;

- and there's violence 'because I don't like you' and violence 'for your own good' - I'm thinking about the people who were forcibly converted because the people doing the converting genuinely believed that they were saving their souls.

So: those are the key points on which I'd base an essay, and I wouldn't be able to come to a definitive conclusion although the analysis on the way would be very interesting.

Answer 9

The Aztec religion- hundreds of thousands sacrificed to the Sun. Failing that, Christianity. For a religion founded on peace and love its followers loved to rack up the death count. Failing that, the Nazi brand of Paganism.

Answer 10

Roman Catholicism, Islam, Mayan/Aztec paganism.