Does religion cause wars?

I believe a lot of people feel that since there is terrorism generated by muslims, and that something called "The Crusades" occurred centuries ago that religion is the cause of war. Some feel that if religion was abolished that we would be better off, fewer conflicts, etc.

I think that people who believe this are optimistic and have a very good outlook on humanity.

No. If religion was abolished, that is, if no one believed in the supernatural, everything was science, we would simply find something else to fight about; some other reason to invade someone else's soil. In fact, wars are NOT fought over religious beliefs, but religion IS used to control the masses. This is unfortunate. A small group of people who wield respect and authority use it to manipulate people eager to be led when in reality, the reason for aggression is quite simple:

I want something you have.

Sometimes the things "you have" are necessities, sometimes they are not. Water, food, oil, land, power... these are reasons to fight. There are no other.

Crusades were about power over the common folk. Extermination of Knights Templar was about money AND power (what's the difference, right?) as the Templars were basically the foreign exchange bankers of their time.

Terrorism isn't about religion. It is about anger, it is about individuals who feel repressed by society. It's about people who use those feelings to manipulate and control... for a sense of power over something/someone.

Don't be fooled. Just as lobbyists manipulate our politicians with money and FUD, leaders of terrorist organizations do the same to people who are willing to follow them. They use words like "JIHAD" to weakly cover their motives.

I'd love to be as optimistic about humanity as some people are... but it comes down to something we never shake from childhood: gimmee gimmee gimmee, I want I want I want, mine mine mine.

Oh, and I am in no way claiming that I am exempt from this.

That's all. Sorry for the rant.

...And Back Again...

I'm not as adventurous as I'd like to think.

Sure, I just installed Meego onto my netbook, and that's fine. But my foray back into the world of FOSS has come to an end.

I was ready to give up Netflix. I was ready to listen to my DRM-stripped music library. I was ready to never play the top game titles ever again. It wasn't enough.

I got linux up and running, quite well actually. I was able to build and run my code, get my mail, browse the internet, even installed Hulu desktop to make up for Netflix. But after a week of using Linux I decided I wanted a more standard gnome appearance. I moved my task bar to the top, and went to add a new panel... that's where it went wrong. I clicked on add new panel and my UI hung. "Huh," I thought. So I tried switching to console mode, it did not work. "Huh," I thought again. I rebooted. All was well until the time came for XServer to start. It didn't. Now I wasn't saying "huh," but instead I was mumbling under my breath. After several tries I gave up. This was damn peculiar behavior for linux in my opinion. I merely used standard gnome configuration options. How can that cause the entire UI to lock up and never start again?!

I could have booted into command line mode and poked around. I could have actually tried several other install/restore options to fix the problem. But the point is I should not have to do that.

It irked me completely. So much so I wiped the system, re-installed Windows 7 and have been trying to restore my disks all week long. That's another story.