Religion has only caused 7% of all wars.

[Zen Badger]

While religion has rarely been the actual cause of many wars, it is indisputable that it has been used by rulers down the centuries to motivate their subjects to fight for them. It is much easier to get the sheeple to fight(and die) for some nebulous ideal than it is to get them to fight for your latest land grab.

And this is why religion is evil. Because it is first and foremost a control mechanism without compare.

[Brian37]

Um you can market any war over boarders or resources or politics, but the best motivator to get people to die for those things is to promise them a sky daddy said they are entitled to them. Hitler did it "Gott Min Uns"

It is impossible to say that most wars are not religiously motivated considering most of the world's population is religious.

[Jacob(smooth)]

While religion has rarely been the actual cause of many wars, it is indisputable that it has been used by rulers down the centuries to motivate their subjects to fight for them. It is much easier to get the sheeple to fight(and die) for some nebulous ideal than it is to get them to fight for your latest land grab.

And this is why religion is evil. Because it is first and foremost a control mechanism without compare.

In that context it's a tool. Tools are not intrinsically good or evil, it depends what it's used for.

[Minimalist]

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.

The "winners" determine the reason.... and then historians write it down.

[kılıç_mehmet]

Historians determine the reason.

The "winners" determine the reason.... and then historians write it down.

Really, I meant todays historians. Their job is to look at documents and determine the causes for whatever happened in the past.

In this case it was a christian blogger.

Well, if the title of the thread is the title of his blog post, I'd say he's out of his mind, as its really impossible to categorize all the known battles that happened in human history according to its reasons and come up wth a percentage.
But I'm fairly certain that religion was not a cause for any major battle other than the inter-religious wars, like among the sects of the same religion, hussites vs. catholics, or sunni vs. shia and etc.

While religion has rarely been the actual cause of many wars, it is indisputable that it has been used by rulers down the centuries to motivate their subjects to fight for them. It is much easier to get the sheeple to fight(and die) for some nebulous ideal than it is to get them to fight for your latest land grab.

And this is why religion is evil. Because it is first and foremost a control mechanism without compare.

Well, sometimes it has been used by the subjects to motivate the rulers. How about that my friend? It goes both ways.
And proclaiming something is evil because it can be used to motivate people into fighting, I'd say that everything can be used in that manner.
I can create an army of mercenaries with the promises of money and immense wealth to be gained from the campaign. No religion involved.