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Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 2:32 am
(This post was last modified: November 26, 2013 at 2:42 am by Lemonvariable72.)
I heard this thrown out in your standard atheist christian debate on Facebook and I decided to try to research this claim a bit and came to this lovely, clear, and bias article edited by matt slick (is that his last name, like really?)
The article is linked here (I dare someone to count the fallacies used here)
http://carm.org/religion-cause-war
Now more seriously speaking, I can not find anything on methodology used to arrive at the 7% number, and the reason I question this is because the cause of a ar is often not as simple as it would first seem, Infact if you study ww1 you will quickly find that roots to the causes go back a 100 years, as a example.
http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2012/08/atheis...s-war.html
this appears to the place where it started, love how he says that ww1 had no religious motivation, when the oppression of the serbs and the assination were religiously motivated.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 4:59 am
In medicine we almost never use the word "cause". The reason being, nothing is ever so simple. Smoking increases your risk of getting cancer, very significantly, but a statement as bald as "smoking causes cancer" is fraught with inaccuracy (and the inevitable rebuttal "well how come my nan lived to 143 and never got cancer then).
Now as complex as the human body is, world politics is going to be more complex by several orders of magnitude. How anyone could state that this war WAS or WAS NOT "caused" by religion is beyond me. People write entire books about the causes of wars (WW1 being a good example) and still don't come close to covering every variable. To pick one factor and call it the "cause" is not, to my mind, very accurate.
I think the closest one could get is to make a list of wars in which the government used religion to galvanize the masses and / or justify the war. That is somewhat more objectively measurable, but still not very.
Take the "troubles" in Northern Ireland. That was predicated on religious sectarianism. But both religions are still there present and correct and yet the troubles are pretty much over. If your grandfather killed my grandfather over religion one might say it was religious. But then my father killed your father in revenge, and you kill me in revenge for that. Still religious?
To my mind, saying a war was NOT caused by religion is no more or less rational than to say that it WAS.
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken."
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 5:02 am
I personally think the only wars that religion has caused are sect wars, like between protestants and catholics, or shia and sunni.
Wars that happened between people of different faiths do not really count in this, as they mostly had other ulterior motives that went beyond religion.
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 5:24 am
Funny how religions (or sects) which are closer, or more alike seem to have more of a problem with each other than completely different.
One of the stock arguments for atheism is that religion is a genetic complaint, that we contract it from our parents / environment. Hence religions tend to be distributed on geographical and demographic lines.
I wonder if the correlation between proximity and hostility is likewise based more on environment than theology. As in that guy who hit the other guy with a rock all that time back happened to be a sunni, so we now hate sunni's.
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken."
Sith code
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 11:50 am
Someone has noted that 90% of the "facts" on the internet are made up on the spot.
I suspect this is one more example of such.
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 3:30 pm
(November 26, 2013 at 11:50 am)Minimalist Wrote: Someone has noted that 90% of the "facts" on the internet are made up on the spot.
I suspect this is one more example of such.
Yes, it was Abraham Lincoln who said that.
"Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken."
Sith code
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 3:36 pm
91%........
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 26, 2013 at 3:39 pm
What a bullshit statistic. Who determines what caused a war exactly? When you can control the criteria it's easy to manipulate the statistics.
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 28, 2013 at 12:31 am
(November 26, 2013 at 3:39 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: What a bullshit statistic. Who determines what caused a war exactly? When you can control the criteria it's easy to manipulate the statistics.
Historians determine the reason.
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RE: Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.
November 28, 2013 at 5:49 am
(November 28, 2013 at 12:31 am)kılıç_mehmet Wrote: (November 26, 2013 at 3:39 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: What a bullshit statistic. Who determines what caused a war exactly? When you can control the criteria it's easy to manipulate the statistics.
Historians determine the reason.
In this case it was a christian blogger.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
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