An excerpt from Karen Armstrong's 'Fields of Blood'

"It will become clear that when premodern people engaged in politics, they thought in religious terms and that faith imbued their struggle to make sense of the world in a way that seems strange to us today. But that is not the whole story. In religious history, the struggle for peace has been just as important as the holy war. Religious people have found all kinds of ingenious methods of dealing with the assertive machismo of the reptilian brain, curbing violence, and building respectful life-enhancing communities. But as with [ancient Indian emperor] Ashoka, who came up against the systemic militancy of the state, they could not radically change their societies; the most they could do was to propose a different path to demonstrate kinder and more empathic ways for people to live together. … We will also examine the nature of secularism, which, despite its manifold benefits, has not always offered a wholly irenic alternative to a religious state ideology. The early modern philosophies that tried to pacify Europe after the Thirty Years War in fact had a ruthless streak of their own. This is because secularism did not so much displace religion as create alternative religious enthusiasms."