... when someone makes wild accusations about your character and then asks stupid questions? Here we go:
If Arafat was a christain [sic]in the same situation your discusion [sic] may be about a martyr,
Not likely. Unlike Muslims, most Christians that I'm aware of don't call just any Christian who dies a martyr. In fact, the term is used pretty sparingly and is rarely applied to people who died while fighting; the point is generally that they weren't fighting, but were killed while peacefully carrying on God's work.
For Christians, people like this are martyrs:
(Jibia, Yemen) A suspected Muslim extremist has shot and killed three American doctors and seriously wounded a pharmacist from the United States on 30 December at a Southern Baptist missionary hospital in southern Yemen. According to The Star, Americans have been warned to take care in Yemen, a largely lawless country known as a haven for Muslim militants. Officials said the gunman entered Jibla Baptist Hospital in the town of Jibia, hiding a semi-automatic rifle under his jacket to make it resemble a child and then opened fire, killing the three doctors instantly.
These men were not killed because they were fighting. They were killed because they were Christians in a predominately Muslim land and were advancing the cause of their faith. And, if this was like most medical missions, they were doing so fairly passively. Yes, medical missions preach the gospel, but their overriding purpose is to just do good and make sure people know that the people doing good are Christians.
BTW, I'm not aware of any recognized martyrs, of any religion, who died of disease or old age.
this may be difficult to see when your head is submerged in a bucket of holy writing.
Glad to know you can keep an open mind.
So if all religion was taken out of the human equation, what would people fight over next?
By phrasing the question this way, you imply that religion is the proximate cause of all war, or at least most, war. If we look at the major conflicts the US was involved in during the 20th Century, we find World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. None of these are conflicts that the US entered for religious reasons and I'm not aware of any religious reasons offered by any other nation. (Although, you could make an argument for Japan, since at the time emperor worship was, to say the least, very prominent.)
While it is a sad truth that many wars have been fought for religious purposes, religion is by no means the only cause of war. For that matter, some times religion is only the justification used for war, not it's true cause. But even if we assumed that all wars which were justified by using a religious argument were really fought for that reason it's still possible to find many other reasons for war. Land, power, ego, revenge, wealth, ideology, and resources come to mind just off the top of my head.
So, if it weren't for religion, what would people fight over? I'm guessing the same things they've been fighting for all along.
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