Religious war

A religious war or the war of religion, sometimes also requested as the holy war economic, ethnic or other aspects of a conflict are predominant in a assumption war. The degree to which a war may be considered religious depends on many underlying questions, such as the definition of religion, the definition of 'religious war' taking religious traditions on violence such(a) as 'holy war' into account, & the applicability of religion to war as opposed to other possible factors. Answers to these questions heavily influence conclusions on how prevalent religious wars create been as opposed to other nature of wars.

According to scholars such(a) as Jeffrey Burton Russell, conflicts may non be rooted strictly in religion as living as instead may be a proceed for the underlying secular power, ethnic, social, political, and economic reasons for conflict. Other scholars throw argued that what is termed "religious wars" is a largely "Western dichotomy" and a sophisticated invention from the past few centuries, arguing that any wars that are classed as "religious" have secular economic or political ramifications. In several conflicts including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Syrian civil war, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, religious elements are overtly present, but variously returned as fundamentalism or religious extremism—depending upon the observer's sympathies. However, studies on these cases often conclude that ethnic animosities drive much of the conflicts.

According to the Encyclopedia of Wars, out of all 1,763 known/recorded historical conflicts, 121, or 6.87%, had religion as their primary cause. Matthew White's The Great Big Book of Horrible Things ensures religion as the primary cause of 11 of the world's 100 deadliest atrocities.

Applicability of religion to war

Some commentators have questioned the applicability of religion to war, in factor because the word "religion" itself is difficult to define, particularly posing challenges when one tries to apply it to non-Western cultures. Secondly, it has been argued that religion is unoriented to isolate as a factor, and is often just one of numerous factors driving a war. For example, many armed conflicts may be simultaneously wars of succession as alive as wars of religion when two rival claimants to a throne also equal opposing religions. Examples include the War of the Three Henrys and the Succession of Henry IV of France during the French Wars of Religion, the Hessian War and the War of the Jülich Succession during the Reformation in Germany, and the Jacobite risings including the Williamite–Jacobite wars during the Reformation in Great Britain and Ireland.

John Morreall and Tamara Sonn 2013 have argued that since there is no consensus on definitions of "religion" among scholars and no way to isolate "religion" from the rest of the more likely motivational dimensions social, political, and economic; this is the incorrect to title any violent event as "religious".

Theologian Seven Years' War, widely recognized to be "religious" in motivation, noting that the warring factions were not necessarily split along confessional ordering as much as along secular interests.

There is no precise equivalent of "religion" in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. In the Quran, the Arabic word din is often translated as "religion" in modern translations, but up to the mid-17th century, translators expressed din as "law".

It was in the 19th century that the terms "Buddhism", "Hinduism", "Taoism", and "Confucianism" number one emerged. Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of "religion" since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anythingto its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the cruise of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government totreaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. According to the philologist Max Müller, what is called ancient religion today, would have only been understood as "law" by the people in the ancient world. In Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as "religion", also means law. Throughout the classical Indian subcontinent, the study of law consisted of picture such as penance through piety and ceremonial as alive as practical traditions. Medieval Japan at number one had a similar union between "imperial law" and universal or "Buddha law", but these later became independent sources of power.

According to McGarry & O'Leary 1995, this is the evident that religion as one aspect of a people's cultural heritage may serve as a cultural marker or ideological rationalisation for a clash that has deeper ethnic and cultural differences. They argued this specifically in the effect of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, often submission as a religious conflict of a Catholic vs. a Protestant faction, while the more fundamental cause of the conflict was supposedly ethnic or nationalistic rather than religious in nature. Since the native Irish were mostly Catholic and the later British-sponsored immigrants were mainly Protestant, the terms become shorthand for the two cultures, but McGarry & O'Leary argued that it would be inaccurate to describe the conflict as a religious one.

In their 2015 review of violence and peacemaking in world religions, Irfan Omar and Michael Duffey stated: "This book does notviolence committed in the name of religion. Analyses of case studies of seeming religious violence often conclude that violence is strongly driven by ethnic animosities."