General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I hate seeing "the religion of peace" bullshit here. [View all]Prophet 451
(9,796 posts)You said that no religion can be considered a "religion of peace". I provided an example of one that can. Now you're switching to a different claim that most religions are warlike.
And these aren't great examples either. Egypt, Greece and pagan Rome didn't go to war and conquer people for purposes of furthering their religion, they went to war for purposes of money, territory and so on. The others, I don't know as much about so can't speak on them. However, atheism doesn't have clean hands either (see, for example, Stalin's murder of numerous priests). Now, if you're saying that some religions other than the Abrahamics can be considered warlike, I would agree. But if atheism gets to disavow Stalin's purges, religion gets to disavow the likes of the Aztecs.
Further, the claim that the world would be more peaceful without religion is worthless because we don't have a test earth to measure it against. I would suggest that the nature of human psychology (with particular regard to Social Identity Theory (that's "theory" in the scientific sense, not the lay sense), conformity and obedience) means that humans would have found reasons to kill one another anyway. Take away religion and we would kill one another over skin colour or nationalism or, I dunno, freckles. Violence is part of humanity, always has been.