Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence
https://www.amazon.com/Fields-Blood-...dp/0307946967/
The book examines the notion that religion causes violence and wars. Official blurb:
The book seeks to show that "religious violence" is almost always political violence or resource wars with a religious window dressing, examines the roles repression and violence play in creating extremists, and discusses the roots of (mostly interstate) violence in various ages. It covers a lot more ground then just religion and religious violence, as it has to in order to explain many of it's points. I was very familiar with the larger points of the book before reading it. The limits of agrarian empires and causes of collapse, the need for "othering" of enemies, that regardless of the marketing for a war the underlying cause is always a dispute over resource use, etc. I did, however, learn new things in the details of the histories of various faiths and nations and was exposed to some new supporting arguments for those ideas. Despite the name, it also gives a lot of time to religion and the history of peace as well, but I would suppose an editor/publisher picked a sexier title to get it to sell better. Some of the most interesting segments of the book are when rival sects split off and one encourages violence where the other doesn't. Same information, same holy texts, same place/time, facing the same problems, yet radically different conclusions on the role of violence to solve those problems.With unprecedented scope, Armstrong looks at the whole history of each tradition—not only Christianity and Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Judaism. Religions, in their earliest days, endowed every aspect of life with meaning, and warfare became bound up with observances of the sacred. Modernity has ushered in an epoch of spectacular violence, although, as Armstrong shows, little of it can be ascribed directly to religion.
As with my last book, not really an uplifting read. It's also not always a comfortable one, either, depending on how comfortable you are with your own hypocrisies. I think it's an important one though, especially if you read it then consider the parallels between political marketing and identity politics in violence in the modern age. We are more secular and religion plays less of a role, and a more compartmentalized role, in societies today then it ever has historically but that hasn't seemed to curb violence or even change the methods that large groups of people are convinced to support it. Secular messiahs, a need for orthodoxy and the excommunication of those who aren't 100% in agreement with that orthodoxy, anyone who isn't "us" is the enemy, "we fight them for their own good", etc.
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Originally Posted by Half Moon
