World War I Was a Christian Jihad!

Yesterday Dr. David Madison wrote a fantastic timely piece on how World War I killed god. Seriously! The horrors of that war--which led to WWII--are too terrible to explain away the non-involvement of a perfectly good all-powerful monotheistic God. He sat by and did nothing--NOTHING--while sixteen million people, mostly Christians, slaughtered each other. If you think for one minute our own free willed choices are to blame you just haven't thought about the nature and value of free will.

Anyway, as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ending of World War I, you need to be confronted with the religious motivations for that war. They involved the certainties of faith. It was a Holy War, a Christian Jihad, one of a number of jihads stretching down through the centuries. Philip Jenkins documents this in The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade.


Philip Jenkins offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and the supernatural was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism.

Connecting numerous remarkable incidents and characters—from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide—Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as never before and shows how religion informed and motivated circumstances on all sides of the war.
One would think at the very least, if the ancient biblical god is still alive and can COMMUNICATE effectively at all, or if he can DO anything at all, then he should've been able to CONVINCE his very own children of faith not to slaughter each other. But no! He let them think they were serving him, even though they were on opposite sides in the war! More than this, he inspired them centuries earlier in the texts of the Bible.

Dr. Hector Avalos documents this religious tendency to war in Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence. He seeks to eliminate the religious motivations to war, by secularizing our world so they would cease, if possible. Sure there are other reasons for war, but getting rid of religion will get rid of a major reason to war, which inspires believers like nothing else can, since religious motivations act as certainties.

If only the biblical god had said the same kinds of things as Avalos does. But no, god didn't because he was a child of his times just like all other gods which were created by men. So Avalos is smarter than god. Let me put it to you this way: If Avalos is smarter than the biblical god, and he is, then that god does not exist, or he's too barbaric to worship, or care about, much less to defend his non-involvement in WWI or any war for that matter.

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