Would There Be Less War If People Just Ignored The God/Religion Factor?

Question

A good part of today's wars are religious-inspired.

Would there logically be less war if religion was never a factor or motive?
Would 9/11 have happened?
Would there be any war at all in the Middle East?

Mind you I said LESS. I didn't say NO war.

Answer 1

Less war? Maybe a little. But as history has shown, people are stupid enough to fall into other ideologies and causes blindly. So something else would come up eventually.

Answer 2

Is "religion" the cause of war, or are "people" the cause of war?

Religion is not the problem. Hatred comes from an evil heart. Wars are the product of an inward problem.

War arises because one group of people want to gain power or advantage over another group. The reason for this power gain is due to either greed or oppression. One group greedily wants to take what another group has, or one group feels oppressed by the other.

Religious groups that war often feel oppressed by the other group as they hold differing ideas. However, this oppression doesn't spawn from the ideology of the religion. Most religions work toward bringing peace, and nearly all have followers who engage others peacefully. Those who goto war use religion as a way to leverage their cause. Religion, therefore, is not the motive, it is just a device to leverage power and support.

It makes sense that people would use religion as a tool for leveraging power, after all, God is all-powerful. If God is on your side, then you feel vindicated. But in most cases, the people who goto war are actually rejecting the right teachings of the religion and the God behind it.

Take 9/11 for example. The people were motivated by anger against our country as they feel oppressed by the influence upon their ideas. They used religion to leverage their cause, to justify their case. However, inwardly they hate America. It has nothing to do with religion.

At the core, people are fighting for what they believe is "right." This could easily happen in the United States. For now, we resort to protesting as many still fear the government power. But as protesting proves to be ineffective and differing groups grow in strength, I am sure we will see an increase in violence.

Answer 3

It's obvious that through the ages, and even now, there are conflicting ideologies which seem to be the basis of wars but this is only sleight of hand, misdirection and or diversionary tactics - the real reason for conflict is that someone wants someone else's stuff.
KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid.
It's ALWAYS about Power and Money.
And if you think it’s about something else – you are wrong.
Look again without letting your own biases influence what you see.
Iraq – Saddam. A bit of a bastard. Killed a few Kurds. Has got Oil. Let’s go.
North Korea – Kim Jong Il – Total bastard – starves his people – Has NO OIL – Leave him.
The KISS principle always works.

Answer 4

Violent, oppressive men have hijacked and twisted various religions to gain power, justify their actions, attract the ignorant and manipulate the naive. However, present-day religious conflicts notwithstanding, atheist/communist regimes imposed far more death, oppression and misery upon mankind than any act of misplaced religious fervor before them ever had.

Cases in point:

- The killing fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia
- The gulags of Josef Stalin's Soviet Union
- Adolf Hitler's world war and anti-Semitic genocide (he was a disciple of Nietzsche and a practitioner of social Darwinism)
- Ceauşescu's Romania
- Mao's "Cultural Revolution"
- Kim Jong Il's North Korea
- etc.

Wholesale slaughter of human life by communist and fascist regimes, all of them run by avowed atheists. Tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of victims of murder, torture and general brutality. In keeping with Nietzsche's prediction, the 20th Century was the bloodiest in all of history, and it was nonreligious individuals who made it so.

So, to answer your question, I doubt it.
.

Answer 5

We don't have to ignore God

However I wish all religions would take a long hike : )

Religion is the root to all evil done here on earth

Love & Blessings
Milly

Answer 6

of course not. We have the 20th century to clearly demonstate that. We have had more death in 1 century than in thousands of years prior combined, caused by secular regimes. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, etc.

If people actually lived there reason, these people would never have arisen and killed so many.

Answer 7

You have a point but I don't think that war would stop cause it's all about money and power and those will always be fought for.

Answer 8

there is no denying that Saddam grew to become into evil. in spite of the undeniable fact that he posed no danger to the west, he grew to become into effectively emasculated after Gulf conflict I. And removing by way of fact he grew to become into evil grew to become into no longer the basis for the resultant conflict that observed. the reason in the back of the conflict lies in a document written via Paul Wolfowitz (google him) he wrote approximately securing US hegemony interior the twenty first Century. His concept grew to become into to topple a center jap dictatorship and something could fall like dominoes thereby securing the section under US effect (slightly like the belief of the domino concept approximately communism in the process the Vietnam conflict era). Wolfwowitz and quite a few different "hawks" in the whitehouse tried to get Clinton to purchase into it yet he declined. After the Afghan invasion the time grew to become into ripe to objective returned and under the guise of WMDs etc the coalition went to conflict! So he had no longer something to do with 911, Saddam grew to become right into an earthly dictator and not an islamic fundamentalist like Al Quaeda and the Taliban, politically they are poles aside. So the conflict is deemed to be unlawful as we went in there under thoroughly fake pretences.

Answer 9

I don't think there would be less war. Something else would give people a reason.

Answer 10

Yes , but don't you think we need to educate ourselves more and immerse ourselves in other beliefs to at least learn . That would solve some wars too....