>>1151999
Social Identity theory..
I know i know, it's not supposed to be deterministic.
But if you think about it, when people start to divide along ideological lines, they become team players suddenly, and there's not just a division, but a full on hatred.

>>1151999
Idk if there's a formal theory yet or not, but religions are not what you think. They themselves are declarations of a political nature, adherence to a religion means adherence to a certain loosely defined political community. Religions don't have 'values' on their own with which they determine the thinking of their followers, currently trending values in a given religion are always the values that would be the values of that given community anyways, and these are determined by the respective community's political, social and economic past and opportunities. Thus religion is also a formal legitimiser of power structures and political aspirations.

When religions divide into sects, these divisions always happen along already existing power struggles - it's the final step of saying fuck you, we are not the same group anymore. A few examples to support the claims:

Christian Schism: Quite obvious, the two most important and roughly equall powerful seats of the Church were stretched over such a distance that one could not directly influence the other and it's imminent vicinity and vice versa. When this became clear, they divided the cake between themselves. Naturally, this was mainly communicated as theological disagreements but come on.

Islam 'Schism': An ordinary succesion struggle. It is an established fact that Shiism was a political movement before they formalised it in a religious form - as Islam was in itself a very clear political reform of unification, progressive laws and conquest, the state and the Chruch were fused together from the beginning, so this was necessary.

Bosnia/ Balkans: The middle of the Balkans was basically the no man's land of religion, neither the Pope nor the Patriarch could firmly extend and stabilise their influence as it was about halfway between them. Hence the strange religious nature of the area, the Bogomil Church and so. However, when the Turks came, it became obvious who was the top dog down there.

>>1152318
Explain the Yugoslav wars without mentioning religion once

>>1152318
cont.

So since Bosnians didn't have strong political ties to anyone, they started converting absolutely voluntarily to Islam, but this was not much else than acknowledging the rule of the Sultan. To this day, they are the least religious of the Islam world, even though Islam serves as the basis of their whole identity.

Reformation: By the 16th century, folks were quite fed up with the Vatican and its taxes and other bullshit. It came handy that they were decadent and degenerate as fuck. So Luther was a great excuse of saying 'fuck you, we are not paying you anything any more and leave yourself out of our politics'. This could happen because the relative strength of the Church was not as great as before by then. If you take a look at European history, Luther was not the firs Luther at all. It's just that back then when no one could hope to or wanted to break free from the Church's grasp, these naive religious true Christianity reformists were burned at the stake.

>>1152353
Also, as I mentioned, I'm not sure if there is a formal theory of all that. But I partially wrote my thesis about this (well, Bosnia and its identity, but this theory was the basis of it) and recieved almost maximum points, so you can consider it academically accepted I guess.

>>1152352
What do you mean?

>>1151999
>religious conflicts
you mean resource and territory disputes

>>1152318
This is both completely true and completely false.

It explains the motives of leaders but completely dismisses the perspective of the general populous. Religious propaganda is very effective in getting masses to genuinely fear and hate the religious practices of other groups.

So it may be true that western Christian and Muslim leaders use religion as a tool to get what they want, but most of their populous genuinely distinguishes themselves by their faith.