The nature of man.

The amount of Letters Pages I scrutinise in any given year runs into thousands and the letters I view may well run into five figures.

Letters from aggressive atheists tend to take three forms:

1] "Science has disproved the Bible" - a claim which is so simplistic I could weep.

2] "Look at all the wars caused by religion" - as if this non sequitur proves anything and

3] "It's all made up, innit? And that is right coz I say so!" - The upmarket version of this is: "Ah well, Man created God in his own image - what - why? - Well coz I say so!"

Points one and three have been well covered on this Blog, so today I shall major on the second point.

The major wars of the 20th Century with any concern to the West were World Wars One & Two, Vietnam, Korea, other communist insurrections and the Spanish Civil. Of all these, only the latter had any religious element at all and the beginnings of that war can only be understood in the context of the proven butchery of symbols of the Roman Catholic Church such as monks, priests and nuns by wilder elements of the extreme left on the republican side. Without that persecution it is extremely unlikely that Mola, Sanjurjo and Franco would have been able to get the nationalists fired up to start that conflict. The break up of the Indian sub continent was a case of its own.

Go into the 19th Century and the major wars were the Crimean, the two Boer Wars, The Franco-Prussian, The American Civil and of course, the Napoleonic wars.

You will struggle extremely hard to prove the point that "most wars are caused by religion" - you have to go back more than two centuries to make that point at all in any form or with any validity in the West - indeed most such commentators feel the need to go back a thousand years to the Crusades to make their points. More than a hint of desperation there! They could of course, have used The Thirty Years War in the 17th Century if their assertions had been based on any overview of history.

No. Wars begin from: greed, racism, the need to dominate, the need to impose political philosophies, aggressive and overweening idealism, the pursuit of power, silencing critics of domestic policies, imperialism, theft of the accumulated wealth of others, the egos of politicians and the nature of Man itself.

Wars can of course, have a religious base but are more likely to fall into the category of conflicts between co-existing groups - Ireland being a good case in point - where aggression is identifiably tribal in nature.

Photo: Pol Pot.