Often the root cause is one faction encroaching on another’s land. Sometimes those factions are aligned along religious lines, other times ethnic or other identities.
However religion is almost always used as a tool to further entrench the sides in their willingness(and even zeal) to continue fighting.
I'm absolutely no fan of institutional religion at all. But religion is often used as an excuse to go to war. It's rarely the actual reason, but a tool to polarize groups. Yes, there were a lot of wars seemingly for religious reasons. But if there's no religious reasons than people artificially created them by creating different interpretation inside the same religion. And if that doesn't work, they find other reasons like etnicity, culture or politics. So it's hard to pretend that religion is actually the root cause.
Admittedly I’m a pretty hardcore atheist, and realize that clouds my objectivity. My comment was a very loose generalization, and I agree 100% with your comment (and let me blanket all others that say the same as you) that religion is the excuse to fight, not necessarily the reason.
The genocides and wars of conquest by atheistic communist nations pretty much confirm that religion is an excuse. Moreover, as organized religion declines, we have seen a corresponding rise in both new age pseudo religions and magical thinking based pseudo cults.
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