Bitbutter

Wars, invasions, civil strife and genocide are not caused by religion. Nor are they caused by atheism, rationality or science. Every war in history has been fought for the same reasons - power, influence, control of wealth, control of resources (including human resources). Some people attempt to exercise power by wielding religious belief. Some attempt to exercise power by wielding political ideology. Some attempt to exercise power by wielding money. Some by claiming legal or moral authority. But it's all about power and influence in the end.

.. says AllyF in one of the hundreds of posts in a recent Guardian Unlimited thread. This is a sentiment I've seen expressed many times lately, and i can understand its appeal. There's something elegant about the idea that all the bad behaviour in the world can and should be traced back to, and ultimately blamed on, human desire for power. Maybe it's true, but even if we grant that, it doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't point out much more nearby causes as well.

Conclusively establishing an ultimate cause for any given event is a fools errand of course. When AllyF says "But it's all about power and influence in the end." how does he/she know to stop there? When a child repeatedly replies to your answers with 'But why?' how do you know when you've got to the real cause? Why not insist that wars are actually "all about the big bang in the end"?

Somehow, we do seem to have some kind of system that enables us to be able to identify relatively nearby causes for events in our daily lives without disappearing down the rabbit hole of causality each time we try. We can say things like "i felt sick yesterday because i ate too much yogurt" and be satisfied with this answer without being tempted to choose any of a seemingly infinite number of antecedent causes. We wouldn't say "I felt sick yesterday because selection pressures favoured ancestors of mine who had a sweet tooth".

I think it's interesting to consider why we are happy to blame the eating of the yogurt for the feeling of illness, but to excuse other (even more essential) causes. After all i might just as well have blamed the fact that my stomach didn't have a greater capacity or that my nervous system created the nauseous feeling.

I suspect the reason it seems right for me to blame the eating of a large quantity of yogurt for my feeling of sickness is that i have in mind a 'baseline' state; a list of things that are to be expected, or even unchangeable, about the world i find myself in. This list of 'givens' includes the fact that I'm human and as such i have a nervous system and that my stomach is as big as I'm accustomed to it being. Any of the factors that a person considers as part of the 'baseline' state is exempt from being blamed for an unusual outcome, even though it might be a crucial enabler of that outcome. Instead it's only the factors that aren't part of the baseline state, factors that we feel we have some control over, that are candidates for blame.

Someone who would disagree that religion causes wars might resist that conclusion because religion seems a normal part of the world. Religion is seen as a 'given', like language or something that is intrinsic to human nature and that will never be extinguished.

But for me, and others, if feels entirely correct (its painfully evident) to point out that religious faith causes war because we vividly recognise that it isn't an aspect of our 'essential nature' despite its ubiquity. We know this because we, a growing minority of millions, have no religious faith.