Religious Warfare In the Contemporary era.

Religious Wars, gods, God, or belief systems in general have been the primary cause of many wars since the dawn of civilization. Homer wrote about how the gods took sides in the Trojan War. Islam was primarily spread through warfare throughout the middle east, north Africa, and parts of Europe after Mohammed passed on. The Catholic church ordered crusades, the goal of which was to retake the holy land from Muslims and create a christian order there. Many lives have been lost because of religious conflict. There is a reason for it, and this is coming from a christian perspective. The reason for these conflicts is because of deception. A force is deceiving people into believing that it is ok to kill in the name of God. The reason for conflicts like this is the dichotomy of good and evil. There are usually two sides to a conflict, and even if there are not two sides, it eventually boils down to two factions. I have talked about the dichotomy of conflict. Now I am going to talk about the religious connotations and components to many of the conflicts our country has faced. I would even argue that religion has been either a primary or secondary motivation in every major conflict in our history, or in history in general for that matter. As for the United states, or country was founded on the principle that "all men are created equal, and endowed by our Creator certain unalienable rights." We also have a freedom to practice religion the way we desire. The revolutionary war was highly motivated by faith. Our founding fathers had some sort of background in a christian or deistic belief system. As I expand this paper further by doing research, I will attempt to support this statement. Right now I am just getting this out in the open and on paper. Anybody has the right to disagree or challenge these statements. I actually encourage it as it stimulates my thinking. Yes, many of the early conflicts we fought were political and territorial in nature, but there is no doubt that faith was a huge component in our motivation to acquire more territory and overcome our opponents. Religion has always been central to the lives of most Americans.  As we move further towards contemporary times, in the Civil war, abolitionists were heavily motivated by northern protestant christian objections to slavery and it's brutality. Yes, some forms of christianity were twisted in a way that oppressed slaves and convinced them that it was God's will that they were in that position, and the type of servitude in the bible heavily differed from the chattel slavery that reduced an entire race to an animalistic state, being treated as not people, but property. However, the teachings of Jesus discouraged such atrocity, he taught to love your neighbor as yourself, and in doing so, naturally you shouldn't treat your neighbor like cattle to be presented to crowds of people and sold as property to someone. It's a logic that escaped many in that time because of an ingrained superiority complex because of someone's race or skin color. In the bible, it called people in authority over others to treat there subjects with kindness and compassion. Now don't just interpret the bible's discourse on servants and servitude as the chattel slavery we saw in our history. You can be a servant, and not a slave. When someone hires you to do a job, you are serving that person. It's just natural. That's the hierarchy of our capitalist system, which I will delve further into later in this blog and somewhat in this paper. You have to have some sort of order and hierarchy in order for a society to work. It's an inescapable fact of life. Now the civil war was fought on the moral objections to treating another human being like property, and there was a great deal of Religious influence in that moral concept. Later on, we fight a few more wars, many of which were to assert our authority and position in the western hemisphere. There was probably still a great deal of faith influencing our behaviors and actions from the time of the civil war up until the First World War. I have to do more research to support many of these claims. I am writing it to get the thought down. I could give you an extensive history of the the First World, but that will come at a later time. I want to get to the Second World War, and the religious nature of it. Now here is food for thought, imagine if the bible were to be written in contemporary times, what the bible would say about the systematic extermination of Jews in Europe. Imagine if that was a biblical event written in the bible like the Babylonian Exile or the Exodus from Egypt. That would be a harrowing story to read in the bible. In fact, the Jewish community calls it in hebrew the Shoah, or "burning" because of how unbelievable and unfathomable the scale of that killing was. Yes, World War II had a religious component. In fact, the Nazis designed a christian belief system called "positive christianity," which created a distorted "Aryan" Jesus, in order for it to mesh with the abominable and twisted Nazi ideology.
        Now I am going to stop for a second and redirect my attention to a bigger picture understanding of this subject, and then I will continue on to the discussion of our approach to communism and the lead up to the struggle against radical islam. Imagine God being a military strategist wants to achieve the most glory to himself, and imagine his adversary also strategizing to undercut God's power and influence in the world. The devil would try to delegitimize God in the eyes of mankind, and corrupt, pervert, and degrade what was once sacred and holy. That's his only weapon, is getting people to lose their faith in God by not understanding how God can allow all these terrible things to happen. When people are shellshocked with loss, grief, or hardship, the easiest being you can blame is God, and also the easiest thing you can dismiss. That is the tactic of a devious agency, because when he crushes your faith, he gives you no hope for a better existence, and you slip further down a path of destruction and sin. You have no hope for the future, and no hope for something better, and you have fallen into the enemy's trap. Now he has broken you from God, and now he will lead you to destruction. God, being the strategist that he his, allows this to happen because he wants to show his power in adversity, performing miracles that show his glory and bring glory to him. Yes, it may sound selfish, but if you think about it, only the righteous and holy deserve glory. We are all unworthy of it. God is the most righteous and holy thing in all of existence. There is glory in conflict, glory in victory, and glory in war. It may be bloody, but it serves a purpose beyond the understanding of most people.

    Back to the history lesson, now I am going to talk about Communism. There is a religious reason we went after communism other than the economic problem, its Godlessness. Its shear and utter Godlessness that states belief in God, one of the most hopeful, powerful, and beneficial beliefs, is delusion and like a drug. The communists were blind, they did not have the cognitive capacity to understand how reality worked. They were decieved. They were delusional. Their economic theories failed to provide a positive quality of life for their people, failed to provide incentives to work harder for reward and failed to understand that an efficient economy has to be relatively low-regulated in order for resources and and labor to produce value. I am no economist, but I do know that there is a price to everything that we do. If we want to stay up late, we are going to be tired in the morning. If we want to lose weight, we have to eat better and excersize. If we want a product or utility, we have to have value produced by our labor that determines our benefit to society to pay for it. That is capital, and that is the basic tenant of capitalism. If you want something you have to pay a price for it. Communism is delusional because they think that basic utilities and services should be free for citizens, but the laws of nature and exchange says there is always a price, and the price communist countries pay for attempting to centralize and command an economy is the loss of liberty and security for the people in those countries. Governments control every aspect of a citizen's life. Your choices are limited in what kind of career you pursue and what kind of life you want to live. There is no freedom in communism, just like there is no God in communism. Communism systemizes human beings into a position where they worship the government, worship the communist ideology, and everything they do is to feed the machine that they have been made into, with no higher purpose but to serve the communist belief system, which operates like any other belief system. It wants to conquer and spread in the minds of human beings. We defeated communism in practice, but communism in theory still exists, and it is being taught with adamant support by many leaders in academia and professorships who want to indoctrinate our youth into believing the delusion and deception of communism. The primary pitfall of Marxist ideology is the anti-religion clause. Had it only just accepted that most human beings believe in some form of deity, it may have been more successful. Poor Karl Marx! His disenchantment and aversion to faith led to the demise of his utopia. You can't kill the idea of God, so you naturally can't kill the belief in Him.

        

 Radical Islam.

Now of course this is a War of Religion! There is no question or doubt! The attack on the World trade center was probably the most clever and darkly imaginative attack in the history of mankind, let alone the United States. The evil of this goes beyond the suicide nature of it. How religious extremists were willing to kill themselves to kill 3000 people by flying planes into skyscrapers disturbed the rather innocent american psyche. Most Americans at the time lived in their own little sheltered world, focusing on soccer practices with their kids and who the best NFL team was. Most people still have no idea what our military and what our enemies have done in the last 16 years since 9/11 and most people don't care, and it is STILL going on. Anyways, we never anticipated an attack like that, which is why it worked, and we were aware of the Islamic extremist threat long before it was carried out. I do know that many muslims viewed, and continue to view our culture and nation as decadent, perverse, and morally bankrupt imperialists who overindulge in sex, violence, drugs, and pretty much anything  considered sinful. There might be some truth to this, but at least we don't fly planes into buildings to kill civilians just doing their jobs. That's pretty sick, but that's not even the most disturbing part of this war. When we went into the countries that we did to combat the threat of terror, The enemy used abominable tactics against us. These were the type of people who would use women and children as human shields, force women and children to arm themselves and attack us, forcing us to take the lives of what should be noncombatants, and things that I probably don't even know about. They would hide in their own holy sites and fire upon us, forcing us to fire upon a mosque, kill a child or woman, and they would use our actions as propaganda tools to make us look like the bad guy and undercut and undermine our outreach to the civilian population and our hearts and minds effort to win over the locals in these countries. The swine! Like I said, I am not completely aware of the depth of this, I only know what I have been told and what I have researched or studied. Now this is my take from a spiritual perspective. If a dark enemy wanted to break the faith of people, the deviousness of using religious extremists to attack the most preeminent power of this world, which was founded on the principle of the existence of God, that spent the better part of the previous century trying to defeat Godless communism and protect the freedoms of people who want to believe what they wish, should come as a shock to us. For many people in our country, faith and religion became the easiest scapegoats for the horrors of reality, saying that religion causes people to act with violence and destructive tendencies. This deception doesn't consider that beneficial power and compassion many people of faith have for their fellow man. The acts of Christians to try and bring other people the hope and joy faith in Jesus Christ brings, and the stabilizing factor of the value of human life the christian faith brings to its adherents prevents many countries from decompensating into failed states and violent degradation. Faith can teach people the value of peace, the value of freedom, and the value of hope. It is one of the most powerful aspects of the human mind and condition, and it should not be dismissed or forcibly removed. Thanks and God bless. As the months go on, I will add to this and edit it.