History is important, because history shows that after the Roman Empire declined, Judaism, Christianity and Islam existed alongside each other for more than a thousand years in relative peace. I'll say it again - people with different religious and cultural backgrounds lived together in relative peace, as you also said here when you were talking about the very little biological difference from interbreeding and living together for generations.
For starters, you have your history wrong.
Are you talking about the same Holy Land which was ripped apart by centuries of Christian-Muslim war during the Crusades? The same territory where Christians were fed to lions in a stadium full of pagans and Jews? Where Jews were stripped of their rights and freedom under Roman rule, and only given a few of them back under Muslim rule, making this seem so much more peaceful? Where Jews were enslaved by
three different conquering empires? Where Islam was born under conditions of war on the Arabian Peninsular?
Also, the world was a vastly different place then. You could live in a village of 200 people and never have any need to contact the world outside your village. Try doing that now. Globalisation and overpopulation have made this impossible, such that we now have friction between groups of people because they are forced to search outside their borders for resources.
So we know that people in the Middle East can live together in relative peace as they had for a thousand years.
Fail.
It wasn't until Western political influence (ie. meddling) through war and half-ass political mandates in the past 80 years or so that the trouble really started. The Cold War also had a big influence on the Middle East with the US v Russia influencing the politics of the region (eg. Russia-Egypt-Iran-US-Iraq). On top of that, it's also really an argument about 'home', whose 'home' is it, who deserves to call it 'home' more than the other. Not religion. But there are people out there, people like you who continue to say it's 'religion religion religion', that argument continues to distort the real political and cultural issues, and it continues to flame superficial issues rather than focusing on the real issues.
Hahaha so now atheism is to blame for the continual bickering and fighting in the Middle East?
I'm also trying to avoid getting into argument about whether Israel deserves to be there or not and whose "home" it is, simply because it would take days worth of debating just to get back to where we started.
My main point to talking about religion causing wars was that mankind is already adept at find division and fault with others. Religion just unnecessarily adds to that problem by giving people another way to seperate themselves from others. Religion also happens to be something which we can change or abolish far easier than we can ethnic groups, economic disparity or resource endowment.
