Asymmetrical Information

It seems Watson's redeeming characteristic is that he thinks Freud "rubbish".

Re the Nazis, it is certainly true that Nazism had little to do with Christianity, but the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany (and, obviously, in most of Europe) that helped make Nazism acceptable to Germans (and thus helped give Hitler enough leverage to seize power) was definitely due to the anti-Semitism of the Church. Obviously, the Nazis took things further by racializing anti-Semitism, but the initial seeds of anti-Semitism were planted by Christianity.

I can't tell you how oftem I've heard ostensibly intelligent people put forth this ignorant notion. That so many blandly accept it indicates how common anti-religious feeling is in some cricles and of how little history many supposedly educated people know.

On the other hand, anybody who recognizes Freud as a fraud isn't wrong about everything.

Let's not dismiss Freud entirely; he had the very great virtue of asking useful questions - his answers were the problem.

I suspect that it's one of those quotes that Watson figured so rhetorically clever that it didn't even have to be accurate. I have those, too, though they're more clever and I generally point out the flaw after saying it when I do, which isn't often, because I'm a fuddy duddy.

Andrew -

Your claim that "the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany ... was definitely due to the anti-Semitism of the Church" is utterly inaccurate. It is probably true that all people, everywhere, are suspicious of "others," and that for this reason people who identify themselves with one religious group (or race, or ethnicity) will be quick to oppress those of a different group. For that reason, some self-identified "Christians" certainly collaborated in the Nazi Holocaust. But they did so in direct opposition to the public teachings and teachers of the Catholic Church, who opposed Nazism from the outset and worked to save an estimated 800,000 Jews from death. See, e.g., this.

Monotheism is merely a very obvious tool of the idea that has truly killed the most people: that anyone has the right to control another; or "power." Insert caveats about children, convicted murderers, etc...

All of the other things that you mention as having a higher body count than monotheism are also sub-categories of the the larger idea.

Ummm, yeah. Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Mao. Rabid monotheists all. Sure...

Jane wrote:

And while I suppose one could categorize communist regimes, who are the other major source of body counts in the twentieth century, as believing in "one true God", none of them were notable for their emphasis the afterlife, unless you count badly executed bronze statues as "life after death".

Well I suppose one couldn't do so without looking foolish. To lump communists in with the monotheists is an absurdity. A primary feature of virtually all ideologies derived from Marxism is the antithesis of monotheism: atheism. In most cases it was enforced atheism. No opiates for our masses, period.

Furthermore the death toll attribuatble to Marxist regimes in the 20th century vastly outstrips Hitler's paltry 7-10 million. Stalin and Mao together were responsible for at least 50 million deaths.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam have nothing on the Global Left when it comes to mass death on a truly historic scale.

Durant said that population pressure was the leading cause of wars. Something to consider in discussions of illegal immigration, by the way.

He couldn't have just said "Xenophobia" or "Nationalism" and covered the same ground without taking such a cheap shot...

The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world.
These two thoughts don't even go together. Hinduism hardly has one god. Nor does Buddhism. And yet stages of reincarnation leading to godhood certainly fit the idea that our ethical conduct determines what will happen after we die. Watson's problem appears to be with the idea that people should be responsible for their actions. When I clicked on the article link I saw the problem. This is from the NYT!!

Hey! Romans, Greeks, Assyrians, Babylonians, Chinese, Japanese, early Vikings, Mongols, Huns, and Zulu I'll grant you, but the Visigoths, by the time they sacked Rome, had been Arian (NOT ARYAN) Christians for about 2 generations. It's entirely reasonable to argue that Arianism was more monotheistic than orthodox Christianity (if one doesn't understand the Trinity). I'm not sure which Medes and Persians you're talking about either, but to the extent that they were Zoroastrians they were pretty monotheistic - all that fire-worship and such.

--The Cranky Pedant.

Watson's statement is the knee-jerk canard of every person, even some rather intelligent persons, who have an axe to grind with a monotheistic religion (or all of them).

Sekimori, for example, by no means an idiot, had a post a year or so ago taking a really nasty cheap swipe at Christians because of another man's encounter with a hypocritical old lady. Sekimori's response was totally out of line in the snide, broad-brush way, and yet she couldn't see it her own self. The follow-up comments were admirably restrained (particularly on the part of the large group she had just casually insulted), but also included a couple of the usual yammering nitwits harping on the Inquisition, etc, with no respect for facts and context.

It happens. Maybe Watson has other ideas which are good. This isn't one of them, however, and cheers for calling him on it. Men and women alike are quite capable of atrocity when they indulge their darker lusts, and any excuse will suffice as a means to the end -- God, no God, and any shade of philosophy in between.

My mother and father in law, staunch supporters of the Chinese government, give their religion as "Communist" without a hint of irony.

Zoroastrianism is actually dualistic; there's a good god and a bad god battling for eternal supremacy.

Watson is clearly wrong, but I think his claim contains the kernel of a more accurate notion: monotheistic societies have used religion as excuse or motivation for war in a way that polytheistic societies didn't (which isn't to say that polytheistic societies went to war less). This notion has some intuitive appeal (to me, at least): if you believe in multiple divinities to begin with, it's easier to accept that other people believe in still other divinities - and they may, in fact, actually exist - and it's therefore less likely that you'd go to war over a religious disagreement, because the stakes in such a disagreement are lower. I could be wrong about this, so if someone can correct me, I'd be grateful, but my recollection is that when various polytheistic societies came into contact with each other (in Europe, at least) they were either willing to accept that different societies had different gods, or (in the case of the Romans) expressly assimilated the gods of a conquered society so that they mapped onto the Roman pantheon.

"This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history."

Minimally, this Watson has demonstrated that one need not be a monotheist to carry the mantle of bigotry...

"Ummm, yeah. Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Mao. Rabid monotheists all. Sure..." As far as I can tell, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao each worshipped only himself - so they were monotheists.

Kidding aside, the issue isn't religion, but fanaticism. If you subsume everything in existence under one big idea, you are well on the way to murdering masses of people to advance that big idea. It doesn't matter whether the idea is the glory of God or Allah, the Aryan race, Marxism, or the Japanese Empire - if that's all you care about, you'll be willing to ignore all moral limits, human nature, and ultimately the laws of physics, in trying to advance that goal. A lot of wars have been simply about looting and territory, including WWI and many small wars where the indigenous population was deliberately exterminated to make room for the invaders, but most of the ones with huge death tolls were about huge and untestable ideas.

It's easy to take a superficial look at history and decide that this way of thinking started with Christianity. If you look at Constantine, Charlemagne, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the wars of the Reformation, Hitler and Stalin look like men that just diverted Christian fanaticism into non-Christian paths. However, that's just part of history. I think Julius Caesar was another fanatic, murdering Gauls for the glory of Rome, and then other Romans for his idea of what Rome should be. Alexander the Great was a fanatic for Greek culture. Neither of them was a monotheist (except possibly in the self-worship sense), and neither was religiously motivated, but it's probably no coincidence that militant Christianity and Islam arose under the heirs of Caesar and Alexander. Christians eventually developed traditions of moderation that limited the violence, but Marxists borrowed fanaticism from Christianity while rejecting the rest, and finally Mussolini and Hitler twisted Marxism into fascism/Naziism. Tojo also learned the wrong lessons from the West.

I don't know enough about the history of the rest of the world to know if there are examples of huge bloody wars or purges inspired by fanaticism that didn't have their origin in Western ideas, but I do know of little ones. In Japan a thousand years ago, monks often killed each other over the exact interpretation of the Buddha's words, and just a few years ago, another Buddhist sect tried to flood Tokyo subways with Sarin nerve gas. If fanatics can find a license to kill in Buddhism, they can find it anywhere!

I think that we atheists should pipe down on the subject of monotheistic religion = death, while we reflect on those doughty atheists Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot etc. But I really don't buy this stuff about Catholicism as the friend of the Jews. Catholic Italy behaved pretty well; Catholic France very badly. And in Limerick in 1904, a Catholic priest organised a little pogrom of his own. When the local Church of Ireland (i.e. Protestant) bishop complained, the Nationalist (i.e. Catholic) press called him a "bigot".

To get back to Peter Watson: I don't know if he's stupid, but he's either ignorant or sufficiently engaged in leftist fanaticism to be blind to the faults of Communism, etc.

I read that piece in the Times Magazine just this morning, and was shocked at that man's density.

More fundamentally, if it were true, I don't understand how he could consider monotheism to be a bad idea, based on this outcome. Would polytheism have produced less war-like civilizations?

Not to mention his snide dismissal of novels in terms of their effect on the world.

Q: How many atheists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: It doesn't matter. They're all going to hell anyway.

Joe Margarac -

Yes, I know that Nazi racialist anti-Semitism is directly opposed to Christianity, and that the Catholic Church opposed the Holocaust (though didn't do enough to stop it). Traditional Christian anti-Semitism held that Jews were bad, but became good once they converted to Christianity, in contrast to the Nazi racialist view that there was something inalterably evil about Jewish "blood."

But it is wrong to say that widespread German anti-Semitism had nothing to do with Christianity. The medieval church preached anti-Semitism (of the religious, not racial, kind) all the time - passion plays, "his blood be on us and all our children," "Christ-killers," and all that. It's disingenuous to say that because this religious anti-semitism mutated into something even more awful, religious anti-semitism therefore has nothing to do with, or has no responsibility for, the Holocaust. Without medieval Christian religious anti-Semitism, there would have been no Holocaust, at least of the Jews. See, e.g., "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Goldhagen.

it is certainly true that Nazism had little to do with Christianity, but the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany (and, obviously, in most of Europe) that helped make Nazism acceptable to Germans (and thus helped give Hitler enough leverage to seize power) was definitely due to the anti-Semitism of the Church.

I entirely agree. The Catholic Church of the era was viciously anti-Semetic, as was the Lutheran church. It is silly to pretend that they were anything other than anti-Jew. But that doesn't make it reasonable to blame *monotheism* -- Christians and Jews worship the same god.

On balance, it may less likely for two polytheistic societies to go to war with another over religion, as Quarterican suggested.

On the other hand, polytheism would also be less likely to act as a restraint on warfare than ethical monotheism (once the latter's logic is fully internalized). Polytheism lends itself to exclusive nationalism. When the Jetians have their own gods, it's assumed that those gods don't care about the Sharkites -- so religion doesn't act as any restraint when the Jetians armor up and go after the Sharkites' land/herds/women. The conduct of the polytheistic civilizations certainly bears this out; see the Assyrians, Babylonians, etc.

On the other hand, with ethical monotheism, there's at least an underlying message that God is no respecter of persons -- that he is the God of everyone. Ideally, this should lead rational people to consider that all people have value, and therefore going out to conquer one's neighbors to steal their stuff is wrong.

In practice, of course, things haven't exactly worked out that way. Old habits are hard to break, and are easy to dress up in monotheistic garb: Instead of "The Turks are our enemies; Woden doesn't care about them; let's go take their land," we got "The Turks are infidels; God is angry with them; let's go take their land." (Or more precisely, "take the land back that they took from us, or at least our fellow Christians.")

The Catholic Church wrestled with the concept of war since at least the Middle Ages, developing concepts such as "just war" that for one of the first time acted (in theory) as a restraint on human aggression. I believe that ethical monotheism had a lot to do with the development of the consensus that one's moral obligations are owed beyond the membership of one's own tribe, even if by the time that principle finally started to be put into action and old-style wars of conquest began to fall out of favor (i.e. pretty much only in the past five decades), the principle was couched in secular terms.

Secularists should acknowledge the debt they owe for their moral principles to the theistic systems that helped develop them.

I see the Watson quote as a classic example of counter-tribalism, a concept that has been discussed on this blog in the past. I seem to recall that Mindles Dreck had several insightful posts on counter-tribalism, which, for readers unfamiliar with it, can serve as a good introduction to this important idea. The posts can be found by clicking on "counter-tribalism" in the "Hot Topics" list on the right.

Also, can't you just feel the smug self-congratulation in that quote.

Watson has only the first syllable right. The single greatest cause of war is monarchy. (I'm including any other form of autocratic government under that definition for this discussion.) Aggression is started by those least accountable. It is the decentralization of power, not any kind of secularization or anti-monotheistic religious movement, that has led to the easing of military tensions around the world.

"it is certainly true that Nazism had little to do with Christianity"

That is not entirely true. Fascism (specifically its German and Italian variants) borrowed both the structural hiearchy and symbolism from Christianity. In terms of ideas, they shared little. Unlike Christianity and Communism, the Nazi's never really proposed a happy ending, unless you consider those non-germans as racially inferior.

-markm
"Mussolini and Hitler twisted Marxism into fascism/Naziism."

elaborate?

I would think a true intellectual wouldn't waste his/her time with value judgements.

TheProudDuck writes, "On the other hand, polytheism would also be less likely to act as a restraint on warfare than ethical monotheism (once the latter's logic is fully internalized)."

When has monotheism ever acted as a restraint on war? Look at the Christian Middle Ages and tell me when any country decided not to invade another purely for religious regions. At best, they may have refrained due to fear of excommunication, but that has more to do with an organized international club that wields a great deal of power than it does with monotheism.

Additionally, where is that restraint today? Is George Bush not a self avowed Christian? Aren't conservatism far more likely to be Christians? If this is the case, why is the right so willing to go to war and the "godless left" is not?

"I believe that ethical monotheism had a lot to do with the development of the consensus that one's moral obligations are owed beyond the membership of one's own tribe, even if by the time that principle finally started to be put into action and old-style wars of conquest began to fall out of favor (i.e. pretty much only in the past five decades), the principle was couched in secular terms.

Secularists should acknowledge the debt they owe for their moral principles to the theistic systems that helped develop them."

You seem to be stating that the concept of moral obligation to strangers or foreigners (those not of one's tribe) originated with monotheism. First, look outside Europe and you'll find this idea easily refuted in other traditions philosophical and ethical literature. Within the western tradition you will find that this idea came around long before monotheism in ancient Greece and possibly Egypt and Babylonia, at least in the work of philosophers if not in popular culture. If you wanted to propose that monotheism made these ideas more popular, you might be on firmer ground.

Watson's assertion that ethical monotheistic societies are more violent than polytheistic civilizations is simply not empirically true. The only true measure of the true level of violence is the per capita rate of violence. By this measure it is easy to show that EM societies have significantly lower levels of violence than polytheistic ones. If EM societies appear more violent in an absolute sense it is only because they have much larger populations.

Per capita rates of violence have been dropping since the end of the stone age. Each new innovation in social organization has led to deceasing violence overall. Monotheism replaced polytheism in part because it made people's lives safer.

Watson clearly hasn't studied the matter in any detail but has instead relied on stereotypes born of intellectual prejudices.

O'Scully writes:

Additionally, where is that restraint today? Is George Bush not a self avowed Christian? Aren't conservatism far more likely to be Christians? If this is the case, why is the right so willing to go to war and the "godless left" is not?

The "godless left" has never had any problem going to war, as long as someone on their side leads the charge. Certainly the hard-left types like George Galloway never met a blood-soaked Third World tyrant they didn't like, as long as he mouthed the proper left-wing, anti-Western cliches between slaughters.

Not that I consider President Clinton to be one of the "godless left," but if I recall correctly, he used the American military more often than virtually any previous President.

And note the distinction between merely "going to war" (a morally neutral act -- the decision to use force can be either moral or immoral, depending on the circumstances) and embarking on a war of conquest.

As for the power of classical philosophy as a source of the modern consensus against wars of conquest, all I can say is that the philosophers didn't have a terribly great effect during their time. (Of course, I have to say the Christian ethic of the brotherhood of man didn't sink in right away, either.) But clearly it was Western civilization, whose Christian worldview incorporated and propagated a great deal of classical philosophy, that brought the world to its present state, where the conquest and absorption of one state by another is universally condemned.

hi meagan,
i think one has to put the idea of monotheism into context--its not the idea of religious monotheism, but ethical monotheism--that there is only one right way to do things (based on one indivisible Truth, that one and one's followers have had the luck to find and follow).

in and of itself, that won't kill anybody, but once one ties it to the service of various political agendas (e.g., christianity in spain and the political objectives of the spanish inquisition, 30 yrs war, reformation, etc), one can see the power of religion as ONE cause in a complex chain of causality. religion acts in some ways as a cover or inspiration for what watson might call, pretty bad ideas (like german fascism). further, thinking that one has the exclusive vision of the light is a way of thinking that is not limited to monotheistic religion. marxism, fascism, and other -isms have all suffered from the same kind of thinking that he lays at the feet of ethical monotheism--a single truth. its the mindset i get the sense that he is criticizing--he seems a pretty radical empiricist, denying any inner life at all.

and actually, in reading the interview, which is very brief, and which is an imposssibly short length to put things into context, i think that the author, would agree with that claim (of putting religious activities into the context of their times)--he does sound like a marxist!

-Rick Mcalexander

"Mussolini and Hitler twisted Marxism into fascism/Naziism."

elaborate?

Which part don't you understand? The close relation between radical Marxism (e.g., Communism) and fascism, or the "twisted" part?

Fascism/Naziism followed most of the practices evident in Communism: subordination of the individual to the collective, central planning, bureaucracy, the creation of a privileged and relatively wealthy class of party apparatchiks and bureaucrats, enforcement by violence and terror, concentration camps, scapegoating of unpopular minorities. (Look up "kulak" for one Stalinist equivalent of the Holocaust.)

The most obvious difference in practice was that Hitler and Mussolini left most businesses in the hands of their owners; however, capitalists had better make themselves useful to the regime, and often had to give Nazi thugs a share of their wealth. From a cynical view - and I think that's the only way to view Hitler's regime - by not confiscating all wealth to the state like the Communists did, Hitler made it easier for his most important supporters to steal it for themselves.

Where Hitler and Mussolini twisted Marxism 180 degrees is in the theory/i> and the rhetorical justification for their rule. Marxism was supposed to transcend national boundaries and races; Fascism was explicitly nationalistic, and National Socialism (Naziism) was also racist. (Not that Soviets and Maoists didn't also use nationalist emotions to stir up the people, especially at war.) Communism preached individual rights while destroying them, and preached equality while raising their favorites high above the crowd; Hitler made up a philosophy where individual rights didn't exist and it was right for the "strong" to take from the weak. According to Communist theory, the totalitarian state was just a transitional form that was supposed to fade away once a true Communist society was established but didn't; according to Hitler, the permanent totalitarian state was the whole point of his efforts.

In other words, Hitler considered human nature to be nasty, and tried to torment his people into making that theory more true, while Communism idealized human nature and then had to lie heroically to cover up the gap between theory and practice.

I'd have thought socialism in all it's perverse forms. Certainthe argument can be made that in sheer bloody numbers the socialists are inthe lead.

(The other autocrats are inthe running, but once you eliminate Adolf, Mao, and Stalin, the Khmer Rouge nutbars, and all the other obvious self admitted socialists I think you find that in absolute numbers the other guys aren't really serious enough.)

And don't tell me socialism isn't a religion. "At has feathers a beak and floats and flys, it quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck: it's a duck"

Ethical monotheism is different from theism.

Try this link: http://www.geocities.com/covtnoah/idolatry_monotheism_ency_judaica.htm

whoops, sorry, I meant "is different from monotheism."

Which part don't you understand?
There's nothing I don't understand in what you said. You simply averred that Marxism was "twisted" into fascism, and I wanted you to elaborate and back up your claim. The condescending language was not required.

Saying that Hitler and Mussolini "tiwsted Marxism into fascism" implies that fascism was a intellectual derivative of Marxism. This is a hard case to make. There was no inherent racial element in Marxist thought, there was no adoration of the young virile male in Marxist thought, there was no aesthetic theory in architecture or music in Marxist thought, and there was no homosexual attraction to Marxist thought. The ideas of fascism and Marxism had different sources.

Now, the end results were fairly similar (i.e., totalitarian chaos), but there origins were different, in my opinion.

On the other hand, anybody who recognizes Freud as a fraud isn't wrong about everything.

The ignorant pronounce it Frood,
To cavil or applaud.
The well-informed pronounce it Froyd,
But I pronounce it Fraud.

Rick: If you look at the history of the Fascist/Nazi movements, their origins were definitely in socialism. Mussolini was a socialist before he developed his own ideas. Hitler took over a revolutionary group that described themselves as "National Socialists"; they modified Marxist doctrines with German nationalism, but they also wanted something far more Marxist than the mild corporate socialism that had been German practice even under Bismark. And Hitler kept peace with the real socialists among the Nazis for long enough to win a plurality in the 1933 elections and consolidate his power. Then he purged those that were too socialist, but there is a traceable evolution from socialist revolutionaries to the hard-core Nazis.

Next you'll probably remind me that Hitler and Mussolini violently rejected Communism. So? A kindred doctrine can be far more of a threat to steal one's followers than a totally unrelated doctrine, and that was why they had to suppress it.

Beyond that, people are often shaped by the ideas they reject. Voltaire certainly shows the influence of his Jesuit teachers, although he was the opposite of what they intended. Half of the basis for Marxism is laid out in the New Testament (love thy neighbor and share all you have --> the brotherhood of man), although there wasn't too much of that love left in 19th century Christianity. And Hitler found that the actual practice of Communism was better described by turning its proclaimed doctrines upside-down...

Rick, my question wasn't intended to be snarky, just to point out that you'd asked two questions. However, there is something close to a conservative/liberal litmus test in there. Liberals tend to miss the resemblance between fascism and socialism, as they pay attention to the socialists' lofty idealistic rhetoric more than the actual results of their programs. Conservatives treat the rhetoric as just "blah, blah, blah", realizing that whenever hard-core socialists are in power, the means chosen and results achieved will in no way resemble the rhetoric. And thus, the two biggest differences conservatives see between Hitler and Stalin was that Hitler left the capitalists in place (and milked them), and that Stalin killed considerably more people.

The error conservatives make in ignoring commie propaganda is that they fail to notice how good it sounds. You've got to work really hard to bring people back to grotty reality from those high-flown dreams.

And the error liberals make - if you haven't figured that out for yourself, you won't believe me.

The fact remains that the intellectual underpinnings of fascism are vastly different than the intellectual underpinnings of Marxism. Fascism was influenced by Hegelianism, but Marxism was a direct offshoot. And in those cases, the bifrucation of Hegelianism came in the vague interpretations, rather than explicitly stated in the text. The point that Mussolini was a socialist proves nothing, it doesn't necessitate that he took socialist ideas and applied them in during his reign.

I didn't read your last post before I made my previous post.

And the error liberals make - (let me finish this for you)... it doesn't work? and by not working, I mean totalitarian slaugther.

The totalitarian atrocities of communism and fascism should is a clear example of extremism -left or right- being inherently bad.

"The totalitarian atrocities of communism and fascism should is a clear example of extremism -left or right- being inherently bad."

and which of those two, pray tell, do you think is supposed to exemplify the extreme right?

warning - be prepared to justify your answer on philosophic grounds.

Well of course, Fascism.

Rick: Hating communists does not make a fascist a right-winger, any more than it made John F. Kennedy a right-winger.

Markm- How very platitudinous of you. I am not going to address your trite comment any further.

My central point is is that Fascism was a derivative of extreme right wing thinking, much as communism was a derivative of extreme left wing thinking. We can trace fascist ideas back to Machiavelli, and even Plato, but fascist thinking by the right was directly connected to the offshoots of Hegelianism. The Hegelian left evolved into communism, and many of the ideas of fascism can be traced to the conservative interpretation of Hegelianism. Historically, the extreme right has been in support of monarchy. This is where the term "right" comes from, those that sat to the right of the head of the one of the councils during the French Revolution were the monarchists. The support of the monarchy was an example of the adoration of the Hegelian man, which in the 20th century was realized in the Fuhrer or Duce.

Even moderate conservativism today is inclined to look to the past with a sanguine face. This idea was incorporated in fascism, but combined with the use of force to praise and venerate the accomplishments of the past.

Nationalism, which is an attitude adopted by the extreme right, was inextricably linked to fascism.

Two traditionally conservative institutions are the church and the military. The hiearchy and structure of the church and military was stripped and a new veneer was laid over it in to help create fascism.

For a historical example, the Franco regime was both clearly fascist and clearly conservative. As was Mussolini's rule in Italy. I quote from Mussolini, "e are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a Fascist century."

The American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

I would also like to add that this is far from a cut and dry issue, and it is hotly debated today.

"monotheistic societies have used religion as excuse or motivation for war in a way that polytheistic societies didn't"

However, it is not a natural feature of monotheism, but an pathogen of Muhammad's that merely found the other major monotheist religion a suitable host. The Crusade was not invented until three of the five ancient Christian patriarchates had fallen to jihad and the other two were regularly threatened by the same; the peoples that did the most to spread Christianity by the sword were the Iberians, who spent hundreds of years immersed in Muslim rule and Muslim culture.

Islam infected Christianity with the fever of holy war, which Christianity has largely but not entirely overcome. It still burns madly in its native host, however, and it remains to be seen if it can be cured there, or if the host will have to be destroyed to protect others from the consequences of its madness.

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