"It's not what we don't know that's the problem; it's what we 'know' that ain't so."—attributed to Mark Twain

I thought of Twain's aphorism when I read a recent column by Vox Day, who writes for WorldNetDaily. Day-who describes himself as a "Christian Libertarian", and who is also a member of Mensa (the international club for the super-intelligent) wrote:

"[A] systematic review of the 489 wars listed in Wikipedia's list of military conflicts, ranging from Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars to the 1969 Football War between Honduras and El Salvador, shows that only 53 of these wars-10.8%-can reasonably be described as having a religious nature, even if one counts each of the 10 Crusades separately."

Yet one of the shibboleths of our era, one that has become dogma for the anti-religious, is the unsupported claim that "religion has caused more wars than anything else in history."

While it's amazing how facts can punch holes in shibboleths, it's even more amazing how impervious such shibboleths are: for a week after reading Day's analysis, people who hate and fear faith will still say, "Religion has caused more wars than anything else in history!"

The supreme irony in this is that the goal of some religion is to set us free from the avarice and blind hatred that has been the real cause of most wars.

I say "some religion", because not all religions are so benign in intent. For example, Professor Samuel P. Huntington has accurately written that "Islam has bloody borders." This does not to mean that all Muslims are bellicose; but since it was established in the seventh century, and the Hadith was collected by al-Bukhari in the ninth century, Islam has been spread by aggression and maintained by fear. Apostasy is to be punished by death.

Even supposedly pacifist Buddhists have resorted to killing and maiming those who reject their beliefs.

Yet the bloodiest of all faiths, beyond question, remains militant Atheism; and the most sanguine form of Atheism is militant antipathy to Judaism and Christianity. It was in the name of official Atheism that Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tsedong, Pol Pot, Nicholae Ceaucescu, and Erik Honneker killed scores of millions of their own people-probably well over 120,000,000. And it was in the name of Teutonic paganism and hatred of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that Adolf Hitler (who is quoted in the book Hitler's Table Talk as saying "it is not possible to be a good German and a Christian") exterminated six million Jews and about as many other people he considered "inferior".

So it's only if you count Atheism and militant Secularism as religions that the shibboleth about "religion as a cause of war" holds any water.

Even then, it must be remembered that there is a strain of religious faith whose goal is to promote love and peace among men. So one has to wonder why the militant Secularists who dominate our governments, our courts, our media and the tax-funded schools are so terrified of that one stream of faith-the faith of four out of five Canadians.

Perhaps Mark Twain was right.