LogFAQs > #968384298

Norman_Smiley posted...

No its not. Most religions spread peacefully then their get crazy people killing non-believers centuries later. Christianity spread in the old world peacefully (new world wasn't peaceful, but it was already a big religion before then). Buddhism never really had conquest as its spread technique. I can't find good info on Hinduism but it sounds like it was spread peacefully. Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism weren't spread by force.

There was force involved in evicting Buddhism from India, and persecution of religious minorities was common in most places throughout history worldwide. Sassanid Persia, for example, considered Christians to be a kind of Roman fifth column and persecuted them mercilessly, for example, while playing to Judaic dreams of a return to the relatively light hand of Achaemenid rule after centuries of more direct and brutal rule by the Greeks and Romans. The latter, in turn, fueled Christian suspicions and persecution of Jews as definitionally Persophiles (this is all very funny from a modern view, what with Israel and Iran being bitter rivals.)