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Lumifer comments on If you can see the box, you can open the box - Less Wrong Discussion
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Which do you mean:
(a) Political factors are the the main cause of every religious war
(b) Political factors are factors in every religious war
If (a), could you substantiate this? It seems like a very strong claim.
Edited for formatting
If you think that religious wars are real things, what do you think is the most clear example of one?
I think the following would all be examples of religious wars:
Of course politics has a role in all of these. Politics and religion intermingle all the time. So each of the above conflicts is political in some respects. But of course that doesn't make politics the "real" cause.
Of course religious conflict can be used, consciously or not, as a cover for political conflict. But the reverse is also possible. And while the distinction between religious and political motives may be clear at the individual level, the problem of composition arises when you think about the motives for an entire movement.
Perhaps a graphic representation of the various models would help. Imagine two groups of people in conflict. In the past, the Blues oppressed the Greens. Now the Greens and Blues are bitter enemies and occasionally break into open warfare. There's also a lot of religious hatred between the two groups that goes back a long way. Here are a couple ways this could work:
Scenario A: Religious differences --> Blues oppress Greens --> Greens resent Blues --> War
Scenario B: Blues want to oppress Greens --> Blues invent their religion to give themselves moral cover --> Blues oppress Greens --> Greens resent Blues --> War
In the real world, where there are other sources of conflict (like natural resources, race, foreign powers playing sides, etc.), it seems like a lot of information would be necessary before being confident that either scenario was the real one.
I do not think that any of your examples, nor any example I have ever looked at, really fits Scenario A. Perhaps the Partition of India or Greece/Turkey.* Religion almost never creates differences. Sometimes religion unifies people. The Greens and Blues, unified by religion, are able to stop fighting each other and attack the Reds. Perhaps this describes your first three examples. Maybe you should call these "wars of religion," but they fit neither of your scenarios.
Scenario B is also rare. I would assign to it only the Thirty Years' War. People rarely need cover.
Ireland is a race conflict, between the natives and the Scottish settlers. I think that this is a typical example. The core is a race conflict, but the names of the parties are religions so that people can change sides, if only a way that half-breeds can signify their allegiance.
Everyone knows that Israel is a settler conflict. If you think it is religious conflict, what is the religion of the Palestinians? The PLO was originally Christian and atheist. It would be odd to call it a religious conflict when the religion of one side changes (even just that of their leaders).
Yes, it takes information to decide, but the quite consistent pattern is that when I obtain information, I downgrade the religious hypothesis. Having such a pattern, I should change my prior.
* The ethnic cleansing between Greece and Turkey is interesting because it was largely done on the basis of religion, but in the name of race. After the partition, the new countries emphasized racial identity and a single language, but before there wasn't much correlation between religion and, say, language.
True.
Good point.
OK, I have noticed the same thing. But that hardly means the political motive is the main cause of all ostensibly religious conflicts (which is the claim to which I was originally responding).
Other ways in which religion could play a causal role in war include:
What if the doctrine of a religion is itself explicitly encouraging of violent approaches to conflict resolution?
What if the version of history promulgated by a religious community, perhaps encoded in its sacred text, casts the community as victims of perpetually untrustworthy outsiders?
What if the doctrine of a religion states that unbelievers cannot be expected to cooperate in Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations?
If the Greens believed in a religion that featured the above characteristics (or some of them), surely that would be evidence in favor of the religious nature of the war?