Many people think that much of the world’s conflict is caused by religion. One recent commenter on one of our social media pages said, “religion only ever holds its grasp on humanity through violence and persecution. The only inevitability is that we will repeat the cycle until religion fades into obscurity.” The idea being that if we only got rid of religion, we would be just hunky-dory.

This made for a nice little atheistic anthem in John Lennon’s Imagine, but it has very little basis in reality.

In Encyclopedia of Wars, authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare. They list of 1763 wars of which 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7% of all wars and less than 2% of all history’s war deaths.

Half of these wars were Islamic, leaving some 3% of history’s wars attributable to some religious cause other than Islam.

Religion is also a minimal factor in other killing. Politically-motivated democide in the 20th century accounted for over 100 million murders and unless you consider atheism a religious motivation, religion did not cause that.

People are made to be religious by nature. If they eliminate religion per se, they will adopt another form of religion such as scientism or the Death Cult of the State in which there is no morality.