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I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people.

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Philip Jenkins

In most cases, obviously, soldiers fought because a government drafted them and gave them a rifle. At every point too, we see the role of nationalistic sentiment, commercial rivalries, and simple greed. But can we ever separate out such motives from the religious? Was that not also true of the medieval crusades?

Government, Point, Religious, Simple, True
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Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.

Bible, Bloody, Islamic, Quran, Scripture, Surprise

Religion appears in so many contexts in WW1. Religion shaped the national identities and ambitions of several of the key players, especially Germany and Russia, both of which defined themselves as messianic nations. In both countries too, secular elites delved deeply into apocalyptic and prophetic ideas, giving their nations a millenarian bent.

Ambition, Country, Germany, Player, Players, Religion

When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century.

Difference, Differences, Lived, Soldier, Thought, War

The typical WW1 soldier was not an intellectual like Ernst Jünger or Wilfred Owen, but was a peasant draftee from Galicia or Bavaria or Sicily, with all the traditional religious ideas. The hothouse atmosphere of war brought everyone into a supernatural-oriented universe of ghosts and apparitions.

Ideas, Intellectual, Jünger, Religious, Sicily, War

It is also amazing to find just how religious and occult-minded some of the leading political and military players of the war were, from von Moltke and Ludendorff to Brusilov and J F C Fuller. Each, in his way, was deeply involved in what we would today call the occult, spiritualism, and visionary religion.

Military, Players, Political, Religion, Religious, War
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