Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is a central presence.

So one of the things that I guess probably you've heard before is a claim level against

Christians or level against people who are religious and that claim is that religion causes

wars or religion is the cause of war and human history and that there's that religion is

bad for us is bad for people because it causes people to be violent.

It causes people to enter into conflict.

The religion causes people to do it a war.

I get that.

I get the where the source of that claim.

I think is not based in fact, but is based in fear.

Let me see what I mean.

Their fear is that if you hold on to a belief firmly and someone else has a different belief

that they're holding on to firmly, that the only ultimate result is going to be some

kind of conflict.

That's what the fear says.

What do the facts say?

There's a book, actually it's a three volume book called the Encyclopedia of War, written

a number of years ago.

And in that book, the author's chronicle, they document all 1,763 wars in recording human

history.

Now out of those 1,763 wars, only 7% of those of wars have come from religion.

If you remove Islam from that equation, only 3.2% of all of those wars, 1,763 of them

...