WAR AND RELIGION

I am sitting at the eighth floor of my office with a faith that the floor will hold me and I believe that I will not fall right through it. Without this faith on the object (Floor) and belief I would not enter the office. But this faith might not hold good at all times. The building might collapse, there could be an earthquake. But my personal experience let me know that 99 out of 100 times my faith holds good. We can extrapolate the same ideas into religion. Seldom have you come across a religious person who holds every religion as his own. Even an Atheist is religious but that he believes in one less a religion than you.

With the exceptions noted above, when someone who holds a belief so ardent and thinks that the others who do not hold the same beliefs and faith are wrong, then that belief becomes his religion. May be we can say that a particular religion, comprises of people holding the same belief that who do not have their belief are wrong and all other set of beliefs are to be condemned since they do not accept it.

When we travel through History, we can establish that religion had a part in many of the wars that killed millions of people. But if we rationally analyze, most wars have political or economic ramification (land acquisition, looting of wealth, control of strategic places, trade routes, dynasty changes, position of power). The Crusades between Islam and Christian, the thirty years war and the French war of religion between Protestants and Catholics, the holocaust against the Jews, and every other war had religion connected with it.
As Jack David Eller states- “Religion and violence are clearly compatible, but they are not identical. Violence is one phenomenon in human (and natural existence), religion is another, and it is inevitable that the two would become intertwined. Religion is complex and modular, and violence is one of the modules - not universal, but recurring. As a conceptual and behavioral module, violence is by no means exclusive to religion. There are plenty of other groups, institutions, interests, and ideologies to promote violence. Violence is, therefore, neither essential to nor exclusive to religion. Nor is religious violence all alike... And virtually every form of religious violence has its nonreligious.

What we need deduce is that in war of any nature, if religion is brought into the equation it translates into the masses and the common man who belongs to a particular religion identifies himself with his group having identical set of beliefs. Religion is an effective vehicle to instigate the masses and in India people at power use it as an instrument to get into power. I do not need to give you examples as I would be running out of pages. Ayodhya Conflict, Operation Blue Star, Kashmir, North East turbulence and even when you study a religion there will be sects within itself and differences exist.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Edward Gibbon

"Without religion, we'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -Stephen Weinburg

All religion advocates peace and love, the religious leader’s claims so. So why is religion a factor in war at all when all the main faiths have little time for violence and advocate peace? "In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, but one must be wrong because God cannot be for and against himself.

Imagine the following case, a baby is born to a Hindu couple at a hospital and inadvertently the baby gets interchanged with that of a Christian couple at the same hospital. He grows up in an environment having certain beliefs, attending church. He is a Christian. But religion is decided on to which family you were born or more placidly if you are born into a group believing something you tend to start believing the same, as right from your childhood it is forced on you or rather you grow up accepting those faith. When you question them you are called an atheist. As Ernest Hemmingway puts it all thinking men are atheist.
Most of the religion tells you what would happen to you after your death. It talks about hell, heaven, punishment, judgment day and such other gloomy doctrines that no religion teaches you to appreciate the joy of living. I have observed that the older people gets they become more religious. I suppose religion prepares you for after life. I remember the times when my mother used to scare me saying “If you tell a lie God will make you blind” and I believed her when I was 6. I was afraid of lying. But I lied once and was scared to death that night that I might go blind. To my surprise I was able to see perfectly the next morning. I realized my mum used it as a means to teach me good morals and the means in itself is not true. Similarly religion is an instrument to enforce morals, discipline and system in a society. When you look at it rationally you would understand that religion is nothing more than a set of faith and beliefs that were invented to enforce morals. The problem with religion is that it never adapted itself to human advancement and is completely out of date.

I know a lot of people who says I believe and respect all religion and in that case they treat all religion equally. It implies that they don t discriminate between religions which more or less equals to believing in no religion as an infidel you would treat everyone the same irrespective of their religion. Imagine a hypothetical situation; where there is only one religion, I guess there would be lesser hatred and differences among the mankind. Many would argue to kill for the right reason is not wrong. Even in mythologies and religious scriptures there had been instances of good prevailing over the evil and God killing the demon and lot of violence in religious history and mythology. People would say a tiger killing its prey is not wrong. Absolutely, I agree but I have never heard of a tiger killing another tiger because it believes in another set of principles.

Religion is a delusion which instead of promoting harmony is magnifying the differences and if people fall prey to it the history would repeat itself, men killing men in the name of religion which is the most irreligious act of all human deeds. I end this with a quote by G. B Shaw.The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.