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Religious Wars: The Crusades

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"In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars." Richard M. Nixon.
Many people believe that all war is caused by your religious beliefs but others disagree. One example is the Crusades. A crusade is a war fought on behalf of God. America uses this excuse all the time. The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups. In all, eight major Crusade expeditions occurred between 1096 and 1291. The bloody, violent and often ruthless conflicts propelled the status of European Christians, making …show more content…
Religion has taken on extra significance today because globalisation is challenging and changing everything. Religious identity not only survives but can take on heightened significance when national and political alliances break apart, as happened in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when Serbs, Croats and Bosniacs were divided along Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim fault lines. Religion has been implicated in all sorts of conflict and violence throughout human history. Simon Smart says that “There is blood on the hands of the faithful, and no avoiding the fact that in the service of the wrong people, religion can be a force of great harm. This includes Christianity. If we consider the sins of the Christian past critics have plenty to work with – witch-hunts, the Crusades, Christian support of …show more content…
Research published in October from the New York and Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peacelooked at all of the wars that took place in 2013. It found no 'general causal relationship' between religion and conflict. In fact, religious elements played no role at all in 14 (40%) of the 35 armed conflicts in the research, and only five (14%) had religious elements as their main cause, the report showed. All of the wars had multiple causes, and the much more common motivation was opposition to a government, or to the economic, ideological, political or social systems of a state, which was named as a main factor in nearly two thirds of the cases studied. The Encyclopaedia of Wars, an extensive study published in 2008, “chronicles 1,763 wars throughout human history. It names just 123 as 'religious in nature' – a little under

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