Not really, just stating that deaths caused by religious disagreements outnumber those caused by non-religious disagreements. You only have to look at the recently release Iraq estimate of 655,000, the vast majority of those are Sunni vs. Shiite religious disagreement. Even in your World War II example you're ignoring the obvious - that World War II itself had a massive amount of religious involvement.Kallima wrote:That is a pretty sweeping statement. It sounds like you are comparing huge numbers of deaths and suffering from a single incident in a single war to those in the name of all religions throughout history. Even if it does dwarf the numbers its hardly a fair comparison.
Whilst I agree some people are violent anyway and I agree that you're right in that religion is one of many excuses to do so however no other reason has the widespread brainwashing and fanaticism that religion does. Millions of children are taught daily that their religion is the right one, that other religions are wrong, many of those are taught this to the extreme that other religions maybe exterminated (This is why there is a seemingly endless supply of muslim suicide bombers in the middle east right now), whilst there are other likenesses to this (i.e. those preaching race hate) they're far more limited in size and scope, certainly nothing on the scale of religion. Of course there is an argument that had religion not existed something else would've taken it's place, and had this been the case I'd too have been putting that down, but the world hasn't turned out like that, religion does exist and religion is the root cause of much death, maiming and hatred in the world. Whilst science is used to kill people, science doesn't teach that people should be killed or converted and that's the fundamental difference - science is a passive subject, religion is aggressive in it's teachings.
