The gods of war : is religion the primary cause of violent conflict?

 by Meic Pearse. To best-selling antireligionist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006), Pearse ripostes that the one thing that bears a heavier responsibility than religion as a principal cause of war . . . is, of course, irreligion. While proving his point in a review of twentieth-century wars and the antitheist ideologies that incited them, however, he grants that those wars' enormous lethality was a consequence of modern technology, not any kind of secularity. He is a historian, not a propagandist, and succeeding chapters weighing the intertwining of war and religion throughout history are full of similar distinctions. On the whole, he argues, religion tends to abet wars that are conceived and fought for political reasons, and this is true even when wars are launched, like the Crusades, at the behest of religious leaders. Before it became an imperial faith, Christianity was peaceable, though heavily persecuted, for three centuries and, since its post-Enlightenment removal from seats of state power, has significantly reembraced that legacy. Essential reading for those caught up in the new war about, not of, religion. --Booklist. (Check catalog)