There would still be war, because in today's world only the Muslims wage war based on their religion. Revolutionary wars, Civil Wars, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War and many wars waged by other countries have not been about religion. However, Religion in our past and in some cases our present has played a large role in conflict. The beginnings of all religions have seen conflict in the name of their gods. People don’t realize that Islam is the youngest of the world’s great religions, that it is still very much a work-in-progress on its vast frontiers, and that its forms are at least as various as the countless confessions and sects of Christendom. Islam is a vivid, dynamic, and vibrant religion of changing shape and potential. But Islam’s local identities are far from decided in its struggling borderlands, and, in times of tumult, any religion can turn toward the darkness as easily as toward the light. Religious intolerance always returns in times of doubt and disorder. This struggle between religious forms and between prescriptive and repressive doctrine of faiths, is one of the two great strategic issues of our time—along with the redefinition of the socio-economic roles of women, their transition from being the property of men to being equal partners with men (which is the most profound social development in human history).
The ease with which today’s Americans of diverse faiths interact in social settings has allowed us to forget that our ancestors, in their homelands, massacred one another over the contents of the communion cup, or slaughtered Jews and called it God’s desire, or delivered their faith to their colonies with Bibles and breech-loading rifles. Some even brought their hatreds to our shores, but America conquered their bigotries over the generations—although even we have not vanquished intolerance completely. Still, for most contemporary Americans, religion has become as comfortable as it remains comforting. But human history is largely a violent contest of gods and the men who served them, and our age is the latest, intense serial in a saga that shaped our earliest myths.
Religions change, because men change them. Fundamentalists insist upon an historical stasis, but evolution in the architecture of faith has always been essential to, and reflective of, human progress. Certainty is comforting, but a religion’s capacity for adaptive behavior unleashes the energies necessary to renew both the faith and the society in which it flourishes. On its frontiers, Islam remains capable of the changes necessary to make it, once again, a healthy, luminous faith whose followers can compete globally on its own terms. But the hard men from that religion’s ancient homelands are determined to frustrate every exploratory effort they can. The Muslim extremist from the Middle East has one consistent message: Return to the past, for that is what God wants. Beware, no matter his faith, of the man who presumes to tell you what God wants. It cannot be accomplished, of course, this longed-for return to a golden age of sanctity and success, that is mostly myth, is gone. But the bloody-handed terrorists and their mentors are determined to pay any price to frustrate those Muslims who believe that God is capable of smiling, or that it is possible to change the earth without challenging Heaven.
Religion can and should be a powerful belief for peace. However, often enough, it has been used to wage war. History has shown us that as religions take it's final form, the will to wage war on behalf of it, dissapears.
