When does it allow force to be used, if ever — and for what purpose?

In defense — "fight those who fight you, and do not transgress" (Qur'an 2:190) — under strict rules: no women, children, elders, monks, crops, or temples. Never to force belief (Qur'an 2:256). Terrorism breaks these texts (Qur'an 5:32); it does not obey them.

Atheism itself contains no doctrine of war — no holy war and no pacifist command either. Questions of force are referred to secular ethics and law: self-defense and lawful state action are the usual limits, and atheist thinkers range from Russell's near-pacifism to standard just-war reasoning.

It has no doctrine of force and nothing in it can authorize one; above all, it removes the usual license for religious coercion — certainty. Individual agnostics judge war and policing by whatever secular ethics they hold, and they say so rather than claiming an agnostic ruling.

Never to spread the faith: 'my kingdom is not of this world,' Jesus told Pilate — 'otherwise my servants would fight' (John 18:36). Beyond that, two traditions: pacifism (the early church and today's Anabaptists refuse all violence) and the just-war doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas — force only by lawful authority, for a just cause such as defense, as a last resort, and with restraint. The Crusades' idea of holy war is rejected by essentially every church today.

The Torah commands specific ancient wars, but the rabbis confined 'commanded war' so tightly — requiring prophet, king, and Sanhedrin — that the category became inoperative; what remained is self-defense: 'if one rises to kill you, rise first.' How Jewish law should govern a modern army, and whether Zionism is a religious duty, a secular project, or a mistake, are live disputes across the Orthodox, Reform, and Haredi worlds.

The canon gives no just-war doctrine: the first precept forbids killing, violence is forbidden to monks absolutely, and the Dhammapada teaches that hatred is never stilled by hatred. In practice Buddhist kingdoms waged war, the Sri Lankan chronicle Mahavamsa notoriously excuses a king's war against non-Buddhists, and some Zen institutions backed Japanese militarism — episodes the tradition's own scholars condemn as betrayals of the precept.

The Gita itself is set on a battlefield: Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that fighting a just war is his duty, and the law books permit kings force for protection and punishment. Yet the same tradition exalts ahimsa — non-violence — as the highest dharma; Gandhi read the Gita's war as allegory, and Hindus have argued over that tension ever since.

As a last resort, for defense and the protection of the weak — never for conversion or plunder. Guru Gobind Singh's Zafarnama states the doctrine: when all other means have failed, it is righteous to draw the sword.

Force belongs to the state alone, under law, for defense and law enforcement — never for belief. Locke's founding argument was that force cannot produce sincere faith, only hypocrisy; by the same logic, mainstream secularists condemn forced secularization — closing houses of worship, banning practice — as a betrayal of the principle rather than an application of it.

There is no doctrine of sacred war. Mainstream humanism allows force only as a last resort — self-defense and the lawful protection of people and rights — and Manifesto II urged the end of war as an instrument of policy.

Internally, only through law: police power under due process, never private violence. Between states, most liberals hold a just-war position — self-defense and defense of allies, with force as a last resort under law (Walzer's modern statement). The unsettled edge is humanitarian intervention: liberals split over rescuing foreign populations by force, in a debate running from Mill's 1859 essay on non-intervention to Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya — and Mill's own exception for 'barbarian' peoples is now cited against him as empire's license.

Its history is overwhelmingly nonviolent — petition, protest, and litigation. The notable exception is the militant suffragettes of the WSPU, who from 1912 turned to window-smashing and arson against property (not persons), a tactic contested then and since; modern feminism claims no right to force.

For national defense and liberation: wars of independence and defense of the homeland are its paradigm just causes, and conscription is the duty it asks. It must also be said that aggression and conquest have been justified in national terms; civic theorists condemn that as the doctrine's corruption, and just-war thinkers like Walzer ground the defense of national communities in strict limits.