There are historic reasons why there are major divisions between religions which go far beyond faith and doctrine. Judaism began as a religion among a small semitic tribe. Christianity began as an offshoot of Judaism and was initially persecuted by the Jews. Christianity has responded with 2000 years of horrible persecutions. Islam drew upon the prior 2. We ended up with wars and persecutions lasting to this day and to whose benefit? If you’re a Christian should really care if your neighbor on one side goes to a synagogue, the neighbor on the other side attends a mosque, and the guy across the street has no observances? No, you’re more concerned about the state of their lawn and whether or not they let their kids run wild. There’s no good reason on a personal level to have these divisions.
The divisions between and within do serve the religious organizations and their leaders. Maintaining strict adherence to practices is necessary to obtain and retain market share. For instance, the Roman Catholic church had a monopoly on religious observances in Europe until the Protestant Ref. The religious wars that followed were nominally about saving souls but were in reality about obtaining market share.
Ongoing divisions between and within religions are about market share.
Religious Divisions are All About Market Share
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In the 4th century the Roman empire was crumbling… a major reason was that there were civil wars between different pagan religions in different regions. Illegal Jewish Christianity was on the rise…citizens protesting collapsing infrastruction were converting from Emperor Constantine’s Mithraic pagan religion. He sought to kill all these birds with one stone by re-writing Christianity with much of his pagan dogma (Father/Son god, virgin birth, pagan hades brimstone judgment, solstice Dec 25 god birthday, Eostre eggs/bunnies fertility) and then proclaiming “Roman Christianity” as the single state religion. The downside was that egotistical Rome said any other religion would be an abomination before God, and condemned to eternal damnation in hell… so it has caused more war and desolation than any other cause in history. The opposite that Christ intended with the religion of love He came to announce to the world.
>There are historic reasons why there are major divisions between religions which go far beyond faith and doctrine.
Yes, of course. Dominant religions tend to pick up converts due to Metcalf’s Law. New religions grow because they meet some spiritual need people weren’t getting elsewhere or something else about it appeals to them. Christianity grew mostly within the Roman women subgroup due to how pro-women it was, and spread from there to men. Read Stark’s *Rise of Christianity* on the subject.
>Judaism began as a religion among a small semitic tribe. Christianity began as an offshoot of Judaism and was initially persecuted by the Jews
I don’t feel like your persecution analysis is particularly historical. Do you have a source for it?
> There’s no good reason on a personal level to have these divisions.
People will literally disagree over everything, the more trivial the more passionate they get.
>The religious wars that followed were nominally about saving souls but were in reality about obtaining market share.
The only major war in Europe considered a religious war was the Thirty Years War, and even then you had the strongest Catholic nation (France) fighting on the side of the Protestant League, so no this thesis doesn’t hold up at all.
And if your thesis is correct, here you are, fighting for your own market share.
Please could you clarify what you mean by ‘market share’.