DEBATENATE

Topics / Faith and God

The challenge

“Religion causes most wars”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. Most wars are about land, power and money. The Encyclopedia of Wars catalogs well over a thousand conflicts and classifies only a small fraction as mainly religious. Even the famous religious war wasn't simple. In the Thirty Years' War, Catholic France fought alongside Protestants against the Catholic Habsburgs. That's politics wearing a robe. And the twentieth century ran the experiment the other way. Officially atheist regimes under Stalin and Mao killed millions of their own people. You'll say faith makes men surer when they kill. So do the party, the nation and the revolution. Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, so a Christian who kills for conquest is breaking his faith, not keeping it. Let me ask you this. If every church closed tomorrow, would land, oil and power stop being worth fighting over? The problem isn't God. It's the human heart.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. When historians sort wars by cause, religion leads in a small minority. Territory, power and resources run the table.

    The Encyclopedia of Wars by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod catalogs well over a thousand wars and classifies only a small fraction of them as primarily religious.

  2. Even the classic religious war was tangled up in dynastic power politics. That's why the alliances crossed religious lines.

    During the Thirty Years' War, Catholic France fought alongside Protestant powers against the Catholic Habsburgs.

  3. The twentieth century tried government without God. The result was mass killing on an enormous scale.

    Officially atheist communist regimes, including the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao, were responsible for millions of deaths, as documented in The Black Book of Communism.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Even if religion isn't the main cause of most wars, it makes people more willing to kill because they think God is on their side.

Nate: It has happened, and Christians are in that history. Secular ideologies hand out the same certainty with the state or the revolution in God's place, and the body count shows it. Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers. A Christian who kills for conquest is betraying his faith, not following it.

What he grants the other side

Christians have fought wars in God's name.

The lines

Sources

  1. Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, Facts on File, Encyclopedia of Wars (2004)
  2. Peter H. Wilson, Harvard University Press, The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (2009)
  3. Stéphane Courtois and others, Harvard University Press, The Black Book of Communism (1999)
  4. The Bible, Matthew 5:9 (first century)

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