Does Religion Cause Most Wars

What causes most wars

We have been bombarded with propaganda by progressives, but both the strength and Achilles heel of progressives is that they are not truth tellers! Their attractive untruths have won people to their cause, and even people who believe progressives are wrong are often bamboozled into accepting as true, lies that are just repeated over and over again.

Take this lie for instance: “Most wars are caused by religion”. I've heard that one sprouted as an argument against Christianity over and over again. But is it true? I've heard it said so many times that I've come to accept it without question! While I was away on holiday I had some time to reflect and thought to myself “Is that really the case? I should do some simple research and check!”

With the internet, a discerning user (there is some really wacky stuff up there!) can quickly check up on facts. Unfortunately we generally can't check in the middle of a discussion with a passionate and well indoctrinated progressive! So I did some checking. It didn't take long. I found near the top of Google's list a global war museum in Sweden that had put up a list of wars in the twentieth century, with numbers of people killed (I think they may have erred on the side of underestimating – in the terrible fire-bombing of residential areas like Dresden and Tokyo [I not saying it was unjustified, just a terrible thing] there was little record of who had been alive there, and nothing remaining to count afterwards! – and the civilian deaths in Russia in WWI and WWII were also probably incalculable.) But the museum did have figures, and also one could click on a war in the list and get a brief description of what it was about – so see if it was caused by “religion” or something else. Here's what I found.

PS if you want to check my sums, the museum page is: http://www.war-memorial.net/wars_all.asp

In the twentieth Century there were a total 265 wars around the globe. Some of these were very small, so to avoid having lots of minor wars skewing the evidence I also refined my search by number of deaths, first to wars killing over 100,000 people, then to wars killing over or about 1 million people, (I included the Korean War although it was 5,000 short of the I million.)

So, of the 265 wars of all sizes: only 24 had religion as a cause. Of those 24 wars, 21 involved Muslims

When one eliminated all the smaller wars (and I chose 100,000 deaths before I counted what was in that category – so it was not selected to give some desired result)

there were 32 wars.

Of these 32 wars, only two, yes, just two were cause by religion. Both of these involved Muslims – one with Hindu's in India, and the other with Marionite Christians in Lebanon.

My last filter was wars causing near or over a million deaths. There were seven such wars, which I will list below:

World War I

3^rd Sino-Japanese War

World War II

Chinese Civil War

Korean War

Vietnam

Chinese Cultural Revolution

As you can see, none of these wars involved religion! (Communism, yes, but theistic religion, no)

So, now you know the truth! Next time you hear someone claim “most wars are started by religion” you can say; “No! That is just not true! In the Twentieth century not one of the seven wars that killed near or over a million people had anything to do with religion!” Of course if you can remember the rest of this article you can quote more: probably one fact easy to remember is “Only one in ten of all conflicts in C20 were religious, and nearly all those involved Muslims!”