5 Doesn't Religion Cause Violence?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Yes. So does irreligion.

The Thirty Years' War was started over Catholic and Lutheran and Calvinist religions disagreeing on what services should be held in churches from the Middle Ages, when they were built by the Catholic religion. Note, Luther in Wittenberg and Bucer in Strassburg (which back then was Holy Roman Empire) weren't content to say "we no longer agree with that stuff, let's build our own church" they insisted on doing things in Catholic churches that a Catholic sees as sacrilegious over and above the sacrilege of a false pseudo-mass.

Sacrilege against holy chrism, sacrilege against relics, sacrilege against icons, sacrilege against holy water, and when it comes to sacrilege against persons consecrated to celibacy, the reformers were not just for allowing them to make that choice, but also for foisting it on souls which would be reluctant to forego the choice they had made when consecrating themselves.

The war between Hitler and Stalin was between a man wanting to replace loyalty to God with loyalty to the Germanic meta-nation and races, with an occasional nod to the proletariat as being more race typic and noble than certain types of bourgeoisie, and a man who wanted to replace loyalty to God usually with loyalty to the proletariat, and the revolution, as more evolved and noble than certain types of bourgeoisie, with an occasional nod to Holy Russia.

"But there are lots of atheists who are neither Communists nor Nazis and who didn't fought in World War II!"

Yeah, sure.

Clemens August Graf von Galen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are two Germans who didn't fight in the Thirty Years War, one a Catholic, the other a Calvinist.

J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are a Catholic and an Anglican, an Englishman and an Irish born (if not purely Irish) who didn't fought the Anglo-Irish and Stuart-Whig wars of religion.

The Middle Ages may have had as many wars as the Bronze age, but not as bloody, and not as ruthless to the losers. And for that reason, not as long. That's thanks to Christianity.

If your point was simply that religion allows violence in some cases, yes. Why shouldn't it? Do you want a monopoly on violence for only secularised and irreligious uses? That's likely to lead to new circles of violence!