Literally everyone in the kosmos and everyone who has ever lived, has had at lease some basic belief set about how they expect the kosmos to operate. It is impossible to literally believe in nothing whatsoever. This means that while it is possible to believe that there are no god/gods and be an atheist, it is impossible to be an apistist. As religion is a set of practises based upon what one believes (indeed the word 'religion' comes from the Latin 'religare' which is an observance), then even atheists have some kind of religion because they act in the kosmos.
What is up for contention is how those practices are played out. While there is a common assertion that religion is responsible for more deaths and wars in history than anything else, that kind of immediately falls to pieces under even the lightest of interrogation, when you consider that apart from diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, plague, influenza, and dysentery, the actual thing that casus the most wars is weaponised selfishness. That is: "You have what I want; I am prepared to kill you and your family/nation to take it." Then there is the argument over what constitutes a person; in which case abortions conducted in both capitalist and communist countries, both voluntary and involuntary, might in fact change the numbers by hundreds of millions of not billions of people.
Setting all of that aside, the subject of this post is about the demarcation line of who is 'Us' and 'Not Us', is the subject of religion. Already we are off to a tenuous start as we can and have put a very very big asterisk on the subject.
Organised religion (as opposed to the disorganised religion of an individual - see above) usually comes with a set of scriptures/mantras/rules/laws/covenants et cetera, which readily inform the adherents of their belief set. This ready cut intellectual material is really useful in defining who is 'Us' and 'Not Us' and does so on all kinds of grounds such as race, geography, gender, and even observance to the physical things that the intellectual material demands.
The internal problem and the big question which results is: does a religion actually give someone licence to hate someone else, as opposed to what they do, or what they are, or what they decide, or is this the excuse to hate someone else? In deciding who is 'Us' and 'Not Us', the follower of a religion not only has to filter this choice through the intellectual material of their religion, but also decide if the intellectual material lends itself to this conclusion, or even if the intellectual material is internally consistent and/or valuable enough to apply.
Here is where the entire field where religion becomes the excuse to condemn people as other. In very many circumstances, we can find that someone is prepared to accept their own kith and/or kin who happens to do something which violates the moral code of their religion but if someone is more than a couple of arms' lengths away, it suddenly becomes acceptable to wish not only existential hellfire upon them in the abstract but immediate and present harm and danger in the here and now.
Think about the so-called "religious wars" that have happened. Was the Catholic v Protestant fighting in Ireland really over the practice of religion? Not a bar of it. The English has invaded Ireland under William III and everything which followed including "The Troubles" has been about the control of Ireland. Not once have I ever heard even so much as a peep of reference to anything in scripture. The current war in Gaza also has nothing to do with religion. Hamas and Likud are about as far away from Qu'ran and Torah as you can possibly get, and the current Netanyahu Government has openly stated that this is about land clearance; with the destruction of innocent people as collateral damage. The people of Gaza have been othered to the point where they are no longer seen as people.
On the other hand, the great waves of the Islamic Caliphates, were also never really about promoting Islam. Rather, they were about conquering land, controlling resources, and finding new and cheap sources of labour to do the dirty work; all with the threat of the sword and the power of the state. This is hardly a new concept at all. Whether it was the Arabs in the 600s, the Spanish in the New World, or the British in the immediate wake of the Industrial Revolution, money and power are what drive the rise of Empire; with religion being used as a paintbrush after the fact.
The "religious right" in the United States which appears to be in the ascendancy right now, also likes to cover itself with the iconography of Christian Nationalism, which is ironic given that they also want to weaponize the state to destroy their designated enemies. Say what you like about the moral conception of and treatment of gay people, trans people, illegal immigrants and whatnot, because it all seems to ring a bit hollow in a nation that on one hand wants to kill unborn babies for economic convenience and on the other thrown poor people to the weeds, also for economic convenience. Caring for the poor and vulnerable, all looks like anathema to the so-called "religious right".
I do not know how you can hold the ideas of civic philos and charitable agape in the same hand as a gladius. I do not know how you can demonstrate love for someone while actively banishing them. I do not know how you can show respect for your god/gods while at the same time othering someone else who is made in the same humanity as yourself.
However, I can understand all of these things if you made the decision to other someone else, to put them outside of your religious space, and to render them as less than human. Because if you render someone as less than human, then you are at perfect liberty to take their money, their house, their bodies, their dignity, their land, and their lives, because if they are less than human then it isn't really stealing, is it?
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