Thread: Anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment in the United States

Originally Posted by gwahir

Alright, you can convince me if you answer me this: would these fights have been as massive (and in some cases, would they have happened at all) without religion?

Certainly. The continual push of movements such as the Crusades had more to do with wealth and acquiring it as well and political power struggles more so than the dressing of religion. Religion, in these cases, is the vehicle through which the leader exercises his control over the masses, getting them on their side and willing to fight and die, but it's not the only vehicle that's used. Nationalism has been used in the past, much to the same effect. Your argument is analogous to: "If there wasn't any such thing as the idea of a nation, would all these countries have fought each other or so severely?" It's not addressing the initial urge for the fights, but instead the dressing that's used to encourage the violence - addressing the symptoms and not the illness itself.

Originally Posted by gwahir

Would there be land conflics over the very glorious Iraqi landscape without religion? Would anyone care what happened to the little tiny scrap of land that forms what's known as Israel? Why would there be fights over oil or refugees if the land itself wasn't so god damn holy?

Of course there would still be fights over oil - don't be naive. Any static resource that's consumed on that level means large countries need to ensure a proper supply to feed their demand and if conflicts are what's required to ensure this, they would exist. To question what would happen to the state of Israel without religion is a massive can of worms that doesn't solve anything. If you remove the religious reasoning of wanting a holy land, you still have a group of people outcasting another group of people from what the latter sees as their homeland - do you honestly think there would be no hostilities after that point? An example of this is the protests that Native Canadians hold in various parts of the country when the government starts shitting on them. Admittedly, we're less violent in Canada, but that's a combination of culture and the fact that, in spite of the injustice, our basic needs are being met. We don't live in a warzone, we have access to clean water, food and shelter, which many of the Palestinians do not have. Because the Palestinians don't have these basic necessities, their fight becomes that much more desperate, and that much more violent because of it. The anger that's there is less religious in nature than it is addressing more visceral needs, such as food, water, shelter and the fact that the current generation was forcibly removed from their homes by an external force so another external force could live there. Religion fits into this as the vehicle through which the anger at the oppressed's circumstances vents itself through violence. Removing it won't solve the problem.

edit: feel free to ignore this last paragraph and question. Gwahir, you already asked this question in another way, and Syme answered with more detail at the beginning of his gigantic post, so I don't know why you'd ask it again.

editedit: Man, Syme answered all of these questions already in the response you quoted him in - you're asking for slightly more detail and not bothering to look into it yourself, while clinging to your already established, underresearched beliefs that support your detest of organized religion. The issue here is that you're still concentrating on a symptom, on the vehicle through which the initial urge moves. The initial urge, or the illness in this mixed metaphor, is the political desires of the leaders at that time, all of which were concerned more with personal wealth and glory than the sanctimony they clothed their reasoning in. That a government would want a homogenous population is pretty obvious - it's easier to control a single unified mass than it is a hodgepodge of cultures. Look at America as an example, because there are so many different cultural groups vying for attention and power, there cannot be any dictatorial control over the country. Spain in the time of the Inquisition is a different story, and they could, through the vehicle of religion, control their population in a dictatorial fashion.

You're basically saying, over and over again, that if a murderer stabbed someone with a knife in his right hand, if we cut off his right hand, or had it never existed in the first place, than clearly nobody would have been killed by him. We're saying that the violent desires or causes that make this metaphorical murderer act are still present, and another means would be found for him to accomplish his goals, regardless of whether or not the hand was present.