[GSlob]

'The wars of religion were also waged for "mixed motives." "
Religion "jumped up" to claim these wars, and expressly organized quite a few - maybe it shouldn't have done so, but it has. Well, self-confession counts. Besides, as Voltaire once wrote. "since the war became one of religion, the vanquished were exterminated as a matter of course". Even allowing for exaggeration, he claims that religion wars were more gory and cruel than the contemporary norm. Secular or mixed wars were done for the purposes of conquest, pillage or enslavement. Indeed, it falls in line with Huntington's thesis, secular as it is. Religions are mostly coterminous with civilizations, thus religious wars are [mostly] intercivilizational wars. And these tend to genocide by their very nature.

[RobbyS]

Voltaire never lived to see the French Terror, where the Jacobins killed more people in one year than the Inquisition did in several hundred. The war in the Vendee was ever bit as savage any any of the Wars in relgion in France in the 16th Century. You are right. Every civilization is shaped by a "religion" if we include in that ideologies which substitute for religion. The problem is that "reason" tends to dissolve into the sovereignty of the will and blood lust. Liberalism's acceptance of abortion on demand is nonetheless bloodthirsty even if the killing is done by surgical instruments rather than swords.