The thing with religion and wars is that they always need it to motivate the soldiers. The Crusades for example -- if they were really about relics and riches (I don't know), they couldn't tell the soldiers that. You can't get hundreds of thousands of people to march across Europe dying and killing people all the way if all you have to tell them is "the King will get more money out of your sacrifice".
They gotta believe they are doing God's work and will be getting a nice reward for it. So the powers that be cook up some hocus-pocus and sell it to the poor, and away we go.
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