What is the cause of wars fought in the name of religion?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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so basically saying that i talked about religion and faith but sometimes in the name of religion of faith there is violence that happens so what is the cause of this the three different aspects to it first of all nowadays there is this whole idea that religion is the cause of violence and therefore the world will be better off without religion but if you look at recent history itself last hundred years the biggest wars were world war one and world war two there’s no religion involved at all in that the vietnam war the korborean war if you look at 90 percent of the wars that have taken place in last century religion was not even a factor in that so if religion was the cause of war then all the places in the world that were atheistic they should have been peaceful places in the world but that’s not the case in fact if you consider ussr and china and they were ruled by communism which was atheistic and within these countries itself the internal violence it is there the internal killing that happened in the red countries actually that is seven times more than the number of victims of world war one and world war two combined together so it’s not that religion alone caused violence violence is caused by the desire for power and that desire for power desire for power and that desire for power can take on many masquerades it can be racial it can be race based class based caste based and it can be religion based also so ultimately it is the self-centered hunger for power that is the cause of violence in any now having said that as the first point when people use their religious belief to cause violence at that time the primary cause of that violence is they may be acting violently because of their religious belief but what is that’s what they see but there is god who is the reality and there’s a god who’s the conception of one’s imagination what does that mean there is some there is a god who’s a real god and there’s god as i conceive him to be so when people conceive of god as a god who delights in the killing of others as a god who will reward me if i kill others well that is not a god of revelation that is a god of imagination so with that notion of god when people commit violence and that is actually uh not it may be violence in the name of god but it is not violence done for god’s sake it is done for one’s own sake with god taken as a add-on to justify it and lastly even when people are motivated by religious belief in their acts of violence now there is the fundamental understanding of god which is lacking now if we conceive of god see god either he exists or he doesn’t exist if he exists if he’s a reality that doesn’t depend on my belief if god exists he exists irrespective of whether i believe or not if he doesn’t exist he doesn’t exist irrespective of my belief or not so our belief is primarily the determiner of our behavior our belief is not the determiner of the reality of god’s existence so when people are brought up in a particular socio-cultural socio-economic circumstance they acquire a certain conception of god based on their situation now whether that conception is the reality whether it is revealed in that tradition or any other tradition whatever it that is questionable so when people could do acts of violence they are quite often they say that they are motivated by religion and to say that they are not motivated by religion is false but to say that religion is the cause of violence that is mistaken why because religion is used as the as the justification for violence but the cause of violence is there is economic grievance there is political grievance there is a hunger for power there are hundred other factors that come up so if we truly understand god god is the god of all people god is not the god of some people as if god exists he is a source of everyone if he’s a source of everyone he’s connected with everyone he cares for everyone and how can he delight in the killing of some of his own people so if we truly understand god then that will lead not to violence but to peace because we will see the connectedness of all living beings and if a particular conception of god makes us fragmented makes us disconnected then that conception of god itself is wrong see religions are meant for god god is not meant for religion and when krishna and the bhagavad-gita at the end is very non-sectarian he says what he’s saying is give up all conceptions of religion and focus on god so what happens is religion is a means to go to god but when people make god a tool to religion rather religion as a means to god then what is happening when people make god as a tool to religion so i want my religion to grow i want my religion to have power i want my religion to be the biggest and god becomes a tool to that then all the such problems come up so god is beyond our religions and then we rather than making god as the goal of religion we make god as a tool to religion then at that time religion becomes not a search for god but rather religion becomes a search for political power in the name of god and when that happens then there is abuse of power there can be terrorism there can be violence so what we need to counter this is education if people truly understand the conception of god what it means and what who god is what it means to understand god to devote oneself to god then that will actually bring in peace and harmony that won’t cause violence does it answer your question any other questions