War and religion
Pope Urban II initiated the two centuries long "holy wars" in 1095. The Crusades that he labeled as "God's will" (Deus vult) saw the killing of nine million people, widespread famine, disease and massacres. Numerous cities, including Antioch, Edessa and Tripoli, were besieged, looted and destroyed. The Church validated for the Crusaders, executing 'God's plan', to disrupt trade routes, destroy agricultural land and religious sites, and commerce prostitution in their camps.
Such abhorrent were the Church's crimes against humanity that the Western mind rightly started hating religion. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1820s, "the fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place." Swiftly after, Europe was overtaken by the likes of secularism, liberalism and feminism, and faith was pushed to the godowns of human conscience.
Fast forward to 1991, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the US as a sole superpower. Francis Fukuyama termed the moment as 'the End of History', the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Humanity tried to embrace the ideas of democracy and liberalism, but soon, it found that it was destined to remain at the base layer of the towering pyramid of the capitalist plutocracy. Samuel Huntington disagreed with Fukuyama and presented the famous thesis arguing that future wars will certainly take........
