Religion, like any ideology based on a perception or definition of morality, has an enormous potential to cause harm. People can disagree over facts, but rarely come to violence over it. People may have conflicting interests, but negotiation or compromise will often result in a more profitable outcome for everyone concerned. People will fight to defend themselves, but once a legitimate threat is eliminated it is hard to keep the troops fired up. Soldiers fight for many reasons; training, unit cohesion, discipline, comradeship, patriotism, but mostly they fight because they see the enemy as deserving destruction because of what he believes or thinks.
But a religious or ideological conflict involves one or both parties considering their opponent as not just mistaken, but evil. The Other must be stopped, or even annihilated, because they pose a threat to everything that's good and right and decent. And when God (or history, Freedom, Country, Honor or righteousness) is on your side, then to even fail to act can be considered a cowardly and heretical if not evil, act. Add to this the perception that victory in conflict is preordained, and the incentive to destroy the enemy is total.
Sure, you can point out the Crusades were fought more for real estate than Jesus, and all wars usually have some commercial motive driving them, but true fanaticism is a major, if not the major, reason whole populations go to war (remember, conscription is a relatively recent phenomenon).
I'm not about to go to war over a dispute over science, but a regime that despised science and sought to replace it with some other belief system, by force, would definitely get me to enlist.
Off Topic » in reply to Religion doesn't harm people any worse than science.
I disagree.
The whole thread (40 posts)
- Science and religion (originally from Mysteries of the Multiverse)
- Questions
- Until I was about 12 I believed in god.
- Curiosity killed the cat, religion kills curiosity....
- That is a pretty narrow purpose for religion, that you and your friend agreed to!
- My friend Barbara observes:
- There's no solace in science for me.
- For me, science satisfies my awe more than religion does.