Religion and Violence by James Hitchcock
August 28, 2007 4:11 pm Religious Responses to Atheist Critiques of Religion, Religion and ViolenceReligion and Violence by James Hitchcock, March 6, 2002
Religious believers are accustomed to being accused as perpetrators of intolerance and violence, and there is enough truth to such charges to take them to heart. At the same time it should be recognized that what is called religious strife is usually only partly that. The “religious wars” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were at least as much about politics, with, for example, Catholic France supporting German Protestants in order to weaken the Catholic German emperor. Today it would be extremely simplistic to think that religion is all that fuels the strife in Northern Ireland or the Near East.