ABSTRACT
It does not require a very thorough investigation of recorded human history to conclude that war is only accepted as a logical solution to human conflict when ideas and beliefs, and the institutions that claim providence over them, become more important than people. From the fanatical torture and murder of the Crusades and the Inquisition, to centuries of Islamic jihad, to the strangulation of millions by India’s Thuggee sect, to the colonial genocide of Native Americans, to the mass exterminations of Jews in Nazi Germany and the murder of millions in the World War that followed, to the politically justified mass murder in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan; a litany of war and human conflict litters the landscape of our past and present. It also requires little inspection to recognize that the most common threads weaved into the core of each of these examples, and countless other human atrocities, are the absolutist ideologies and dogmatic beliefs that fuel and justify such lunacy and irrationality. In short, war has proven time and time again to be the rational conclusion of the irrational mind. As noted by Harris (2004), it is “our most cherished beliefs about the world . . . leading us, inexorably, to kill one another” (p. 12).
