observer wrote:Go even further back and you get Athens fighting Sparta in the Peloponnisian war which as far as I know didn't have a bit of religious side. Just the wish for power or the fear of the other side having too much power. And that's what it's all about.
Two points:
1. Even though the Peloponnesian war was not fought on a religious premise, great amounts of money was wasted on oracle prophecies and hundreds of animals were sacrificed to the gods as offerings to appease them or gain their favour.
What a waste of resources and not unlike what many christians and muslims persist in doing even today.2. I'm sure that the wish for power and control was behind the Crusades. I'm also sure it is what urged the most blessed and enlightened prophet Mohammed to violently persecute the Jews in Arabia and what motivated David, a celebrated hero in all Judaic religions, to cut off the foreskins of Philistine men after killing them and offer them to a Jewish king.
Having said all that, I don't see anything in all Judaism, Christianity and Islam that extricates them from the war and violence waged by their followers. At their very core, both the Bible and the Kuran are filled with stories of how an ethnic group of people, by the grace and blessings of god himself, waged ferocious war, killed hundreds of thousands of unbelievers and established in the case of Jews Israel and in the case of Muslims 'the Caliphate'.
The new testament, which is basically four people who hardly knew Jesus telling four different stories on his life, doesn't offer any war stories. However, that never stopped Christians from simply ignoring it and quoting the old testament instead, at convenience.