Some scholars have opined that of 1,763 wars in recorded history, only 123 were motivated by religious causes, accounting for less than seven percent of all wars and less than two percent of all people killed in warfare. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-alan-lurie/is-religion-the-cause-of-_b_1400766.html It's true that many people have used religion as an excuse for behaving very badly. But it's too simple to say that none of these bad acts would have occurred if religion did not exist. Some clergymen abuse children, but so do some scout leaders, coaches and teachers. Would European settlers in America not have committed genocide against Native Americans if there had been no religion? Would our society be far more advanced if religion had never existed? I doubt it. We human behave badly because we are animals - like gorillas or lions - who are motivated, perhaps genetically (like gorillas and lions) to seize territory in order to maintain power, protect our tribes and our assets and further our genetic lines, not to establish the validity or supremacy of our "god."
Without religion we wouldn't have had the Crusades or the Thirty Years' War or the massacre of the Cathars. We also wouldn't have the great cathedrals of Europe, and maybe not even the engineering that made them possible. If you don't feel inspired by a belief in a god to build edifices that reach to heaven, why would you go to that effort and expense when your little mud hut is sufficient for your solitary, nasty, brutish, poor, short life? Without religion we wouldn't have the glorious music of Palestrina or Gabrieli or Bach's B-minor Mass. We wouldn't have the Sistine Chapel or Michelangelo's painting on its ceiling; we wouldn't have Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece (and maybe he wouldn't have bothered to develop the art of oil painting at all). We wouldn't have Angkor Wat or the Taj Mahal or the Izomu-taisha temple or the Great Buddha of Bodh Gaya. We wouldn't have the poetry of William Blake or George Herbert or T.S. Elliot's Ash Wednesday or the writings of Thich Nhat Hahn or Thomas Merton or the magnificent language of the King James Bible. Religion has inspired great art and great acts of charity as well as great evil. If nobody had a sense of any force greater than themselves or a desire to explore whatever that might be, would we nevertheless strive for some transcendently beautiful expression?
I'm not a believer but I'm glad to be living in a world that includes Chartres Cathedral and J.S. Bach. Religion has been responsible for great art and great evil. I think the evil would still have existed without religion, but I'm not so sure about the art.
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