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To: Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit
I am afraid we may have to get into definitions of war here. Clearly humans go to war to defend themselves (or their resources). Can you provide an example of an organized group the represents a tribe, city-state or nation that have gone to war for, how did you put it, "satantic evil". In which the acquisition of resources was not the primary motivating factor?

If you define "resources" broadly enough, you can fit any war into that category, even an overty Satanic one (i.e., thinking of converts and subjects are "resources"). Do you consider sacrifices "resources"?

Also don't forget that the Romans not only sacked Carthage but they salted the ground so that nobody could live there again. Wars of extermination, not to conquer lands to take goods, can and have happened.

For me the only two instances where there is even a semblance of an argument that religion was the reason were the Muslims in the 700s and then the crusades. But those were just about power, plunder and control of resources as well.

Broaden your historical and geographic scope. In the New World, we have the Aztecs, Moche, and possibly others warring with others to take sacrifices for their (by our standards) evil and bloodthursty deities. The earliest Chinese writing consists of Shang oracle bones and quite a few contain inscriptions concerning the sacrifice of foreign captives to their deities. And there are plenty of other cases where we simply don't know why two societies went to war.

You might want to see Lawrence Keeley's book War Before Civilization. His observations suggest that the line between violence and warfare isn't all that clear and that there are plenty of reasons why two groups of humans go to war, some of which are counter-intuitive (e.g., trading, mingling, and intermarrying between two cultures often creates more reasons for the two cultures to go to war rather than lessening them).

Finally, you might want to see the behavior that's been observed with male chimpanzees going off into "enemy territory" for the sole purpose of hunting and violently killing a male from another tribe. Contrary to what a lot of people have been taught, animals can and do murder their own kind on purpose.

83 posted on 12/16/2005 10:09:59 AM PST by Question_Assumptions
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To: Question_Assumptions

Great, thanks for those comments.


102 posted on 12/17/2005 12:40:14 AM PST by Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit ("A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." - Dwight D. Eisenhower)
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