Imp-Chan wrote:
Look, people have been using God as an excuse for violence for most of our history, regardless of the religion. I can think of major examples for pretty much every major religion and/or culture in the world today, and throughout history. The only exceptions are specifically non-violent sects of different religions, but even in those cases the major parent religions still have distinct stains. Even cases where there is no specific God, but there is something like ancestor or spirit worship, that's been used as an excuse for violence.
People just plain like using violence to perpetuate their point of view. If no one believed in God, there'd eventually be some other excuse.
^-^'
As there always was, and still is. Professional historians are just as bad about this as us amateurs. You can find otherwise reasonable scholars trying to blame most of human violence on the drive for wealth, money, power, patriarchy, class dominance, race dominance, religious dominance, and every other simplification you can think of.
My take on it, just from counting wars at various places and times and noting who started them, is that the primary cause of war is egotism and love of family. Which is to say, most political entities, historically, were ruled by monarchs or monarch wannabees. They started wars to glorify themselves and their families, to make themselves more important and to leave something nice for their (usually ungrateful) children.
Religion is way overrated as a cause of war, although it is always available as an excuse for some sultan or king's ego trip. The Crusades, in particular, should rate barely a footnote in the annals of organized violence and the Islamic jihad (of which the Crusades were an imitation) was, with some exceptions, spent as anything but a political excuse a thousand years ago.