Atheism - less war?

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, you and I both know that such examples won't be found. There aren't any gods ordering anything anywhere in the first place. That doesn't address whether or not the people involved used their gods as an expression of whatever other motivations they may have had for something.

Many polytheistic cultures (and even some more accurately described as animist) necessitated armed and lethal combat with their fellows as it is attached to something they positively valued - or as a means to achieve a spiritual end. Quite often the endorsement of a god (where applicable) was attendant to this larger trend.

Consider certain subsets of germanic paganism wherein a requirement of death in battle was mandated by a deity (in order, no less, to swell the ranks of his apocalyptic army - that was doomed to lose) in order to be granted entry into their positively valued version of the afterlife. This is a mandate not for targeted warfare - but random and wanton destruction of life (up to and including ones own).

Similarly, any culture in which a warriors success or prowess is intrinsically tied to the "spiritual power" of the group is also a culture in which some god or another is used to establish the legitimacy of this model. Such is the case with a number of native american tribes (and more generally, many tribal societies the world over)

Consider here again the hindu mythological wars which were waged with the intention of exterminating - that is the correct word- exterminating the rival forces. That one side is seen as "the good guys" and the other "the bad guys is entirely equivalent to any narrative posed by monotheistic deities - similarly that the account is mythical (in this case) is also equivalent to the mythical command from any -one true god-.

Pantheons are filled to the brim with war and death gods - further demonstrating our very -human- preoccupation..with these occupations. No example of barbarism or brutality (as we would call it now) is unique in the operative to monotheism. This isn't to say that the tone of this sort of thing wasn't altered by the rise of monotheism (but we do have to nod the hat to other contributing factors - such as the time and regions in which monotheism arose). It's difficult, as a transitional society to wage large scale war, for example. But once you have at least a relatively developed infrastructure and industry it becomes again (if not for divine reasons- for practical ones) an imperative to war. I'm not criticizing the notion that monotheism brought something to the mix that had the effect of amplifying this (I think that point has been established to death) - just taking care to accept that the brutality we see in the history of monotheism had been with us for long before any one god was a twinkle in some mullahs eye. IOW, if something unique was leveraged in these examples it wasn't brutality specific to any one faith, but specific to human beings. Further, if something unique was leveraged it doesn't seem to be the faith itself (as many of us had already been more than willing to "kill for our gods" - for quite some time-). As usual, religion gets credit where it is undeserved. I'd say the success of monotheism in the brutality and warfare dept came down to leveraging a point in time and place - rather than anything remarkable about the religions that championed it. Meanwhile, we don't have any evidence that polytheistic societies were any more peaceful (though we longed for this to be the case for quite some time) - while we do have plenty of evidence to the contrary in the stockpiles of weapons and defensive (and offensive) fortifications of the time periods involved (in the regions involved) as well as their cultural narratives - which often do include divine drumbeats to war, divine pretext to war, and divine justifications for war (as well as spiritual or other "ill defined" values associated with the spiritual again extolling the virtue of and encuoraging armed conflict). A conflict over a "sacred site" or "holy land" is hardly unique to monotheism either. Often times "sacred site" was just a border (consider the strategic brilliance in declaring a mountain pass a holy site..btw), or a claim to resources. Tha bit above, about declaring holy sites is one of my biggest interests. For example, many tribal societies would either declare something holy and then build funeral pyres at the site (or the other way round - we can't know for certain) that just so happened to be at a very important point in any conceivable conflict with their neighbors. This always provided a ready justification for "violence sanctioned by the gods" - with the added kick of invoking the desecration of the sanctity of the rotting remains of ones ancestors. A little something for everyone.