WAR AND RELIGION
God Doesn’t Play War
War, much like religion, is a human invention
The list of things that I hate is rather short.
I hate war. I hate the lack of empathy. And I hate it when people become unreasonable. But we can’t help the latter. Despite our progress and our scientific achievements, we’re still ruled to a large extent by our animal instincts. And fear, although it’s a mechanism meant to protect us from danger, often overrides our mental faculties and makes us behave irrationally, even to the point of self-destruction.
You see fear, as an instinct, was meant to protect animals from their predators. It was meant to trigger the fight-or-flight reaction. An animal will probably base its decision on a rough size estimate of the perceived threat and any previous experience with similar encounters. Often, a wild animal will attack a human encroaching on its territory, even if the human isn’t really a threat. The animal simply doesn’t have the reasoning capacity to understand any given human’s intentions. It can’t quite tell a tourist from a hunter.
Fear wasn’t designed to help modern humans deal with existential threats, such as those presented by technology. Our primal fear will be triggered by a nuclear bomb leveling a city, but as time goes by and Hiroshima and Nagasaki fade into the background of history, we tend to forget the threat and push it to the back of our minds. After all, both of these cities are just fine today. No permanent harm was done, right? Thus, some people think that a nuclear war is something that we can manage, we can survive. The truth is that we might survive, in small numbers, by eking an existence in remote locations, but our civilization will be gone.
This becomes even harder when we are faced with semi-visible threats, such as the climate crisis or completely invisible ones, such as AI. Humanity is just beginning to realize the catastrophic results of the greenhouse effect, and many are still unconvinced. All the while, the course of our climate has already been fixed for decades and it will take a monumental effort to turn it around if we’re still here to do it. As for completely invisible threats… unless we witness a Cylon breaking the neck of a baby in a stroller, we won’t take that threat seriously until it’s far too late. We can only hope that this threat will never materialize.
As it has been said (and despite our better efforts and intentions), we are still largely chimpanzees with nuclear weapons. On top of our fight-or-flight natural instincts, we have gifted ourselves wonderful things, such as religion, which often makes us even more unreasonable than a scared animal.
Oceans of blood have been spilled over the burning question of whose imaginary friend is right. The answer, of course, is no one, not just because said imaginary friends do not exist, but because religion itself is a human attempt to explain the inexplicable. If we accept that God exists, we immediately must deal with the fundamental failure of the human mind to truly comprehend the concept of an all-powerful, omnipresent being.
So, how could we hope to understand an entity that has made everything in the impossibly vast cosmos? We can’t grasp infinity or even really great numbers, for that matter. We can say the number two trillion, as a current estimate of galaxies in the universe, but we can’t possibly visualize the quantity, the size, the distances and the sheer number of stars and planets that these two tiny words encompass.
Therefore, the God who made all that is most certainly so far removed from human understanding that if an actual book was written by it and about it, it would probably make very little sense to us. In trying to understand it, we would be like bacteria trying to interpret the motives of humans.
Tellingly, the books that humans have written to explain the mind, the intentions and sensibilities of God are even less useful than the hypothetical tome written by God. How can a human write a book about an entity whose nature they can’t even conceive?
That didn’t stop many from claiming to be prophets, holy men or God’s chosen, preaching the word of God, and pretending to know its mind. Thus, the faithful have found out that God needs money, for some reason, or animal or even human sacrifice depending on the deity. Or, rather, the culture sustaining it.
But above all else, God apparently needs the faithful of the rival deity to die horribly. Like the good, old classic computer game named Populous, the deity that retains the most possible followers, while butchering all those of the rival deity’s wins. The game was much more interesting than the real thing, the actual wars of religion, since in the universe of the game the gods themselves (usually the player and one AI opponent) use their powers to smite down the followers of their enemies. You can see the lightning striking down those tiny, hapless pixel men, the earth splitting up to swallow them and so on.
In our real world, and outside the various mythologies, gods have never interfered in the wars of men. Rather, it’s men who implicate God(s) in their brutal actions. Sure, there are a lot of apocryphal stories about thunder and lightning, trumpets, signs, portends, magical banners, guided arrows and so on, but conveniently all these mysterious phenomena seem to have vanished in the modern age. Why is that?
Yet people still continue to butcher each other on behalf of their imaginary friends. The latest chapter of this long, bloody history is playing out in Gaza right now.
Or is it?
The Middle East issue is quite simple when laid bare, but also quite complicated. In the very broadest of terms, a group of people whose distant ancestors once held claim to a small region, attempted to return to it and form a new nation, displacing the people who have been living there for centuries. The Jews certainly needed a country to call their own and the Arabs certainly had a right to stay where they’d lived for hundreds of years.
Religion doesn’t really factor into this, in the sense that a conflict was naturally going to ensue, as both sides believed to be in the right. When it does enter the picture, is when both sides are asked to compromise. That’s when the cultural gap and the different religious outlooks stop people from coming together to find a solution.
The Jews think themselves to be the chosen people of God, while the Arabs see them as infidels who come to steal their land. Naturally, in this context, religion plays a key role for the leaders of the two sides to grab hold of the reins firmly and never be in danger of losing them, no matter what they do.
Remember what we said in the beginning about fear? That it is ill-suited to govern complex human relations, issues and concepts? The Israelis fear that they will be subjected to another Holocaust if their national project fails. The Palestinians fear that they will be subjected to genocide themselves. Judging from the conditions they have faced daily for the past 80 years it’s hard to fault them. This oppression makes the Palestinians easier to sympathize with in the West, builds on the ready-made foundation of latent (and active) antisemitism and of course, angers the rest of the Muslim world, making Israel feel that enemies surround it. This fear hardens its resolve even more and the oppression intensifies. Thus, the perfect vicious cycle has formed, one that wasn’t made by religion but is certainly reinforced by it.
It would be hugely reductive to call the Middle East issue a matter of religion. Still, religion is certainly an important part of it insofar as it exacerbates the issue, keeps past wounds from closing, and makes it much easier to put labels on people, especially if said labels can draw upon a well-established and normalized foundation of bigotry: the greedy, vengeful Jew and the fanatical, suicidal Arab.
Any analysis based on these stereotypes, regardless of what side it chooses to champion, necessarily glosses over the facts and obscures other important factors: political, geopolitical, economic, and humanitarian. It ignores that there are dissenting voices on both sides, those that stay clear from the respective narratives of extremism and can offer hope for a peaceful solution.
Religion is, has been, and sadly probably will be closely connected to war and it’s a precious tool for any ruling order hoping to find eager recruits to send to slaughter for a cause that would otherwise mean little to them. But that’s because it has always gone hand-in-hand with secular power, for the benefit of both the religious and the ruling establishment.
Attributing this tragic conflict, and any other with similar characteristics solely to religion is as blind and dangerous as a fighter believing they will give their life for the benefit of their soul.
I’m sure that God, whatever it is, doesn’t care much for human-drawn borders.
