Rig, you say that "I don't think you can have wars without religion either"...

Wrong! Well, wrong, that is, if you think religion is the root cause of most wars. The root cause of most wars is ruthless economic and military competition for resources, valuable land, and control of commerce and trading markets and industry. Religion almost always plays a part in those wars....but that is because it is used by cynical and opportunistic governments as a wonderfully effective motivator to get people all worked up to support the home cause and oppose the foreign one. It's just a trumped-up emotionally-laden excuse that proves handy to get a lot of people up in arms and onside for a war, that's all. This is particularly so in the Islamic world and in the USA at the moment.   The wars are fought over material motives and control of material resources and cash, not over religion.

Do you think the neocons are fighting their wars over religion? Ha!!!!!! They don't believe in anything etherial like that. They are fighting over control of oil, water, trade, military supremacy, commerce, politics, media, and profit.

They could not care less about any God or religion. Maybe Reagan cared personally about God, maybe even Bush cares personally about God...but Reagan and Bush were just false "faces"...figureheads placed for public consumption. The people who put them in office don't care a hoot about God...but they DO care that they can control and divide and manipulate and confuse the American public by pandering to religious values and playing on people's fears. YES! That is what they care about. They're just cynically using religion as a way of moving the great, confused public willy-nilly in the direction they desire.

Also, if you can keep the religious people and the non-religious people in a society at each other's throats over various utterly trivial issues...WHILE accomplishing the much more vital financial, strategic, and economic goals of domination that are on your real agenda....so much the better.

That's what is happening. Religion is not the cause of any of these wars, it's the very visible red herring that gets trotted out to motivate the fighters on both sides, feed the fires of conflict, baffle brains, and keep the pot boiling.

And you've been caught by that red herring. You're a bloodhound sniffing down a false trail that has been laid by people with great material gains in mind.

In the end they will betray both you AND the religious people, because they don't give a hoot about the lives of either one of you. They do find your mutual distrust and hatred, though, greatly to their benefit. It keeps you distracted.