Did life for the Jews and their neighbors become less violent as local myths gave way to the more sweeping tales of Yahweh, Baal, and other deities with a wider scope than their predecessors? Did Greece become less bloody when local gods were replaced by a more or less shared religous pantheon, even as it remained politically divided? Did the Dark Ages spread of Christianity across Europe lower homicide and war deaths, or at least make any increases caused by the collapse of the Pax Romana smaller than they would have been?
Pinker's tables in The Better Angels of Our Nature do not directly deal with this issue; his summary of the bloodcurdling contents of the Old Testament implies a negative answer.
My own intuition is that the move away from local gods and toward shared and monotheistic religion was pacifying in its time; raiding your neighbors at night to steal their sheep, kill their men, and abduct their women is less likely to appeal when that neighboring band's gods or god are also yours.
Indirect support for the shared religion as pacifying hypothesis can be found in Pinker's tables. It's interesting to compare Figure 2-3 on p. 53, which shows an average yearly war deaths rate of around 500 per 100,000 people in various 19th and 20th c. non-state hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticulturalist societies like the Hiewa of New Guinea that I suspect have fairly local gods to Figures 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3 on pp. 60-63, which show annual homicide rates per 100,000 in England and other European regions from 1200 to 2000. The European homicide figures for 1200, when shared religion prevailed but central authority was weak or very weak, are a great deal lower--around 20 to 90 per 100,000--than the war-only estimated death rates for the societies in New Guinea, etc.
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