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These two sides have been warring since Luther nailed up his 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church. It is a power struggle. The fact is that if you look at history, people who agree with each other on almost everything will fight to the death over the smallest differences, because they don't look small to insiders. People who are very different from each other often don't have much to fight about, at least politically and theologically. Of course people will fight over resources, but they don't fight mercilessly to the death, just hard enough to obtain and maintain the resources, whether those are gold, oil, water, food or whatever.
Ask yourself, have there ever been any Christian-Buddhist wars of religion? I can't think of any fought for religious reasons. But have there been any wars of religion between the monotheistic faiths? Your question points out only one of them.
So to be a little more specific, northern European rulers adopted Protestantism partly as a way to free themselves from the influence of the Pope. The Church had the deadly power of Excommunication and the Interdict, which threatened the monarch and all his subjects with eternal hellfire. The Church liked this power, declaring itself the power to damn and save souls through the power to bind or loose sin. If you were excommunicated, it meant that you couldn't go to confession, and so your sins couldn't be forgiven, so when you died you went to Hell. Northern European rulers jumped at the opportunity to be free from such a threat, and when Protestantism declared that only God could save or damn, it was music to their ears.
There has been violence on both sides. In general, the Catholics won out in France, but the Protestants won in England. It got really bad in England, with a lot of wars and bloody purges. I don't think there is a place that saw fighting that bad... Not unless you were a Jew, but that's a whole other issue.
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