Gods Warriors on CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/gods.warriors/
http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=3&x_outlet=14&x_article=1354

I watched the first part of this series a week or two back. It is from the 'A plague on all their houses' school of secular critique of religion. It is not journalism at all, but an attempt to derive the causation of war in religious belief. Very few wars in history have been caused by religious belief- vast numbers have been caused by ambition, greed, tribal/national prestige and jealousy. Was the Arab conquest of the middle east, Asia and north Africa in the seventh century about spreading religion, or about building a huge and lucrative empire? History tells us it was the latter. Was the Spanish conquest of central and south America for spreading Catholicism or to gain a huge and lucrative empire? 99% of the evidence points to the latter motivation. Even wars that are ostensibly about religion turn out not to be; the Crusades were supposed to be about freeing the Holy Places from Muslim control, but the Crusader kingdoms that were formed as a result were all about worldly gain and political maneuvering. Quite often, the rulers of Crusader kingdoms cooperated with the Muslims against the Byzantines, fellow Christians.

The common canard that all wars and problems in the world can conveniently be blamed on religion is long-overdue being debunked. Its true that cultures which encourage peoples and nations to go out and conquer because they are holders of the ultimate truth often include a religious component. But it is also true that imperial ambition often feels it must hide its true nature with the fig leaf of religion. I believe that the core motivations for human behaviour are roughly constant throughout history, and the desire to be top dog, to dominate and rule and possess are the ones which really drive men to act. Religion is useful for controlling and ordering people, and giving them purpose and morals and high morale. It is much less useful for giving them the motivation to go out and conquer the world. Both Christianity and Judaism, if adhered to in the proper spirit, preclude the building of worldly empires. Christians and Jews who strive to do that do not do so with the blessing of their religions. They do so in spite of religious strictures against doing so. Islam is a slightly different case- before the Greater Jihad replaced the Lesser Jihad as a Muslims primary goal in life, you could have argued that warfare with the aim of taking over non-Muslim countries was justified. But as the Greater Jihad is nothing to do with the outside world, but is about the internal state of goodness of the Muslim individual, Lesser Jihad (the violent one) is no longer an imperative. Which is why there haven't been any religiously motivated Islamic invasions for a very long time. The Ottoman empire was a turkic enterprise running on the same lines as the other great empires, with the same goals- money, prestige and control. It had the fig leaf of the Caliphate, but ditched it in 1919 as soon as it no longer served a useful function (ie when Turkish nationalism replaced Ottoman empire islamism).

Most of the arguments proffered that 'most wars are caused by religion' return to the same few events- the Catholic-Protestant wars of the 16th century, the Spanish invasion of Mexico, the Islamic invasions of the seventh century and the Crusades of the eleventh and twelth centuries. As I have argued, none of these cases properly evidences religion as the prime motivating cause. For every Catholic-Protest war, there were twenty English-Dutch (protestant vs protestant) or Spanish -French (catholic vs catholic) wars. The Catholic church itself behaved for much of the middle ages like an uber-empire, a multi-territorial empire where the pope had the ultimate say-so. It was perfectly happy to have Christians die fighting other Christians if the purposes of the universal church were served. So thats not really about religion, but about ostensibly religious organisations which actually have completely earth-bound secular concerns and motivations.

I hope one day people will stop abusing religion both by stealing its clothes to disguise their true motivations, and by blaming it for events completely outside its purview.