Want to catch up on religions progress through the world, and the wars that shaped the current religious map, but don’t have hours to spend reading about it? Well this short film is the one for you. Essentially it plots the major points in history which created areas of religion and drew the borders. It’s worth 90 seconds of your site, if only because it will remind you of Risk.
It won’t take much study to find that many many many more people died at the hands of secular humanist governments (Hitler, Stalin…)than all religion based wars combined. Just for your info…
You may want to do a bit of research on that one. Stalin reopened many churches during WWII and used religion as a tool. George Bush has admitted that he went to war in Iraq on God’s instruction and Hitler was well known (although not amongst Christians) and praising Christianity after rejecting Roman Catholicism. If the antagonist in a war is religious, at some point that religion must become accountable, even if only because it has not been explicit enough in making war a sin. Look at the war with Iraq, there are no religious reasons for going to war, but because George Bush did it on the grounds that his God told him to, religion is a HUGE factor. Maybe, just maybe, if he didn’t have a God, he would have looked at the evidence, realized that there were no WMD’s, Sadam was not an immediate threat to the country and may have pursued other means of removing him from power. Means may not have involved the death, injury and maiming of thousands of troops and innocent civilians.
Hold your horses, everyone.
1. First, the map is not quite inaccurate, in that as far as we can gather, man has always been religious (eg by analysis of burial sites etc…) so the map should not begin with a ‘neutral’ colour as if people had been ‘unspoiled’ as yet by religion.
2. Secondly, much of the spread of all faiths, including Islam, was peacefully spread. People often saw something good in the new religion (Buddhism and Christianity in particular) which they wished to adopt for themselves. Western culture and learning came from the rise of Christian monasticism, for example.
I am not disputing, of course tensions that naturally arise as the “borders” (these are of course not consistent with national borders but between growing groups of believers) became more defined.
This is, of course, precisely what is happening now with the so-called New Atheism, which is becomming particularly agressive…
3. Thirdly, the attempt of both Hitler and Stalin to manipulate believers is (hopefully) not meant to be a proof that their atrocities were motivated by a pious Christianity! (I have already commented on these villains in other posts on this site, so will refrain here).
4. Fourthly, to my knowledge it was a Palestinian politician who claimed that Bush had told him to invate Iraq. Regardless, it would surely be an overstatement to argue that Bush was attempting to convert Iraq to Christianity by the invasion… which would apparently be the point of linking this with the article about the timeline. Indeed many Christian leaders (including, very prominently, Pope John Paul II) condemned the war.
5. Lastly, atheism produced more Christian martyrs (those unwilling to deny their faith for political expediency) in the 20th century than were martyred in the other 19 centuries combined. This is particularly astounding given the very small percentage of atheists until the latter part of the century. Perhaps State Atheism should be added to the map? At least in this case the borders are real and the wars were real wars.