Re: Would there be war without religion

On Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:39:59 -0500, Paul F Austin
<pfaustin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11/25/2011 4:29 PM, Eugene Griessel wrote:
On Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:19:15 -0500, Paul F Austin
<pfaustin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 11/25/2011 3:56 PM, Eugene Griessel wrote:
On Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:34:43 -0800, "DGVREIMAN"
<dgvreiman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Dennis"<tsalagi18NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns9FA823A37403tsalagiNOSPAMasusnet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Andrew Chaplin wrote:

Dennis wrote

Dr. Vincent Quin, Ph.D. wrote:

Eris wrote:
Would there be war without religion

Why not? in 25 words or less
;-)

ACW, WWI, War of the Pacific, American Revolutionary War,
Napoleonic
Wars...

Oil!

And, coming soon to an underdeveloped region near you, water!

Ah yes, the first cause of wars! That's why the Kurds don't have
their own
country - they're sitting on top of oil and water. Oil, water, and
Kurds
don't mix!

Dennis

If there is no reason for a war, man will invent one. We fight wars
because we like to fight them, and we are good at fighting them
because we fight them so often. Our species must control our
population. Most of our predators have been destroyed or controlled,
including the spread of virus predators. Without War we would be
eating each other very soon.

Unfortunately wars come very low down on the list of reasons for human
deaths. Last time I checked wars accounted for 0.4% of human
mortality. Cars take out at least five times that number!


Things have improved over the millenia. Although the further back in
time you go, the thinner the data, archeological excavations seem to
show that over most of human history, an average of 45% of males and
5-10% of females died by violence. By comparison, the "blood-soaked 20th
Century" seems positively edenic.

One thing it is difficult to establish is just what percentages are
relevant. Fossilisation is not the norm - so your sample is of
necessity skewed. But even the mummies of Egypt, and there are
thousands of those, show that disease is, and probably always was, the
biggest killer of Homo sapiens. And many of the wounded that would
recover today probably died back then from infections. If you look at
child mortality rates just a century or two ago you see a picture that
shows that making it past your 5th birthday was something of an
achievement!


An interesting take on the subject of prehistoric war can be found in
Keeley's War Before Civilization, where he summarizes the archiological
data. It's an interesting book.

Using how many skeletons of an estimated how big a global population?
Wars, until very recently, were confined to narrow areas when they
occurred. Results of war probably accounted for more deaths than war
ever did - famine and disease carried by armies. In fact I think it
was the Korean war that was the first in history where actual warfare
killed more than those that died of the side effects. It is
estimated, don't ask how, that approximately 78 billion Homo sapiens
have ever lived. That is in the last 120000 years or so. One would
need a fairly large number of skeletons over a fairly wide
distribution to begin to make any relevant sort of statement as to
what effect wars had on human mortality over a given period. Here,
where Homo sapiens arguably originated, we have only a few dozen
incomplete skeletons extending over more than 70000 years up to the
Howiesons poort. In many cases "incomplete" is a laughable
description for things like a few molars and a bit of jawbone. So any
statement on prehistoric man has to be made together with the land
area covered and the possible population thereof. Assume you are an
archaeologist of the future and you come across Arlington cemetry in
your digging. You could make some exciting, but totally false,
extrapolations from your data, could you not? Wars tend to clump
fatalities better - in common burial sites, even in days long gone by,
than those dying "normally".

Eugene L Griessel

'Hey, there's a gigantic wooden horse outside and all the Greeks
have left. Let's bring it inside!' Not a formula for long-term
survival. Now if they had formed a task force to study the Trojan
Horse and report back to a committee, everyone wouldn't have been
massacred. Who says middle management is useless?
.

Relevant Pages

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