I agree in part, but "In the name of religion" is rather difficult to argue... the Crusades were ostensibly "in the name of religion", but they were essentially land-grabs - Western powers wanted the fertile land and natural resources of the middle east as much as they did the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They convinced their armies to put their lives on the line by giving it a religous angle... it was the best way to get them fired up. Today you tell them they're dying for "Freedom".SCope13 wrote:Yes, they were terrible terrible people, and yes, I agree with the idea that belief in god isn't a measure of how good a person is. But neither of them did that in the name of atheism. The Crusades were done in the name of religion. 9/11 was done in the name of religion. The Inquisition and the witch trials were done in the name of religion.
9/11 could also be argued to be a territorial reaction to Western powers occupying sovereign land in the Middle East as much as it could a "religous" action. Yeah, the people that carried it out did it for God... but the people that ordered it had more complex reasoning (though God was included), as they've stated quite a lot. US military bases in Saudi and the like get mentioned an awful lot... it's not really about spreading the good word of Islam.
The Inquisition and the Witch trials, sure, most definitely... but you're also talking about the Middle Ages there. Spain was in the middle of centuries of flipping between being a Catholic state warring with Protestents like England and getting sacked by the Islamic Moors - "patroitism" is very easy to mix up with religion at that point. We (the English) burnt Catholics here because we were a Protestant country terrified of invasion from Spain or Italy - Catholics were seen as potential plotters (See Guy Fawkes!)... it's not a lot different to Stalin hanging people for not being Communist. In a state of war anything that looks different to the safe and normal gets given an increasingly nervous eye.
Religion is rarely the actual root problem (as the peaceful co-existance of Islam/Christianity in certain areas of Spain pre-crusade attest)... it's just a very common symptom because most people up to the present day have been religious... therefore most people fighting in wars have been religious. Going forward we'll see just as many humanitarian evils as knowledge of science and tecnlology spreads... less and less will be overtly "religious", but it won't really mean too much.
