I'm a huge fan of Bill Maher. I really didn't like him at all until I saw "Religulous," which is a movie I recommend to anyone. I didn't like his smarmy, condescending manner, I didn't like his arrogance, and I didn't like his tendency to lapse into self-righteous posturing.
Now, however, I like all of it, because his no-holds-barred honesty excuses all his faults so long as I'm concerned. And if that fat drug-addled son of a bitch Limbaugh has his "dittoheads," I'd like to coin "Mahertians", if someone else hasn't done it already, for those of us who agree with everything Maher says.
Well, almost everything.
I was watching an episode of "Real Time" when he made the claim that "Religion causes all wars." The point was argued, badly, by a second-tier member of the Professional Atheists, some chick named S.E. Cupp, who, frankly, isn't fit to carry Sam Harris's jock. She's an atheist--or claims to be--but she's one of these cute, perky chicks who strikes me as a bimbo who latches on to the most recent intellifad in an attempt to convince people she's really smart and has depth when she really doesn't. Anyhow, when she disagreed with Maher, all she could so was chirp, "Nationalism! Nationalism!" as an alternative to religion as the cause of all wars.
As if that twit would know nationalism if it bit her on her on the bottom of her Wet Seal capris. Or pulled her phony attitude glasses off and stomped on them. Trust me on this. I've been a glasses wearer since I was four years old. I know who needs 'em, and I know who's wearing them just to look smart.
But, frustratingly, I have to admit to being in her camp on this one, even if she's too dumb to figure out how she wandered into this camp. The plain fact is she's right and Maher's wrong on this. Religion, as abhorrent as it is, generally plays little to no role in human conflicts.
It is absolutely true that, in many conflicts, the combatants are of differing religious faiths. But it's equally true that religion is generally only one of about a zillion differentiating factors, and usually one of the least important.
Let's take, for example, one of the longest-running "religious" conflicts in history--the more than 600 year conflict between the Greeks and the Turks.
Now while it's true that the Greeks were, in the main, Orthodox Christians, and the Turks were largely Sunni Muslim, it's also true that the two groups had different languages. Different histories. Different points of geographic origin. Different economic systems. Different political structures. The Greeks and the Turks even looked physically different in those early days, before the inevitable intermingling.
Moreover, the Turks had no interest in stomping out Orthodox Christianity. In fact, just the opposite. The Turks were more than happy to let the Greeks, or the Serbs, or the Wallachians, or any of their conquered peoples maintain their ancestral faith so long as they paid their taxes for doing so. In fact, they encouraged it, because it was a great source of revenue for them. It was called the vilayet system, and it was really uniquely successful at keeping ethnic, national, and religious tension at a low boil throughout the life of the Ottoman Empire.
So that's a conflict that, even though misleadingly labeled religious, had very little to do with religion--but an awful lot to do with the Ottoman sultans' expansionist policies. They wanted stuff.
Even in the case of conflicts that appear to be purely religious, if you pull back the sheets and examine them more closely, the truth is generally a little more complex than that. Take the English Civil War, for example, which, for a long time, was framed as a fight between the traditional Anglicans and the Calvinist Puritans.
Except that the Anglicans--the "Cavaliers"--were, in the main, the traditional English landed aristocracy, and the Puritans--the "Roundheads"--were, in the main, members of the emerging non-noble bourgeois middle class. Again, this is an economic, not a religious struggle.
Some of the bloodiest conflicts, by the way, are fought between people who share precisely the same beliefs. The American Civil War, for example, which claimed more American lives than any war before or since, was fought largely between Anglo-American Protestants of varying denominations on both sides.
One of Bill's favorite examples of religious wars is the Crusades. The Crusades, surely, had everything to do with religion, didn't they? Or did they? Did they have a lot to do with asserting European dominance in the Mediterranean? Or did they have a lot to do with controlling certain vital east-west trade routes--like the Silk Road--which were threatened by Turkish hegemony in the region? Or did they have a lot to do with getting rid of those potentially dangerous second and third sons, disenfranchised by primogeniture, by sending them halfway across the world to fight an enemy no one had ever seen? Or did they have a lot to do with getting rid of that pesky Jewish moneylender to whom you've mortgaged the fief and who now wants his money back? Or did they have a lot to do with plundering and looting one's fellow Christians in the Byzantine Empire?
It is true that Peter the Hermit--the guy who first fired up the peasants with fire and brimstone rhetoric about Jesus's city in the hands of the infidels--was a religious nutcase. But let's face it, this was in an era when communications were slow and unreliable at best. He wouldn't have gotten far without the support of the aristocracy--which, by the way, as subsequent events in European history have borne out, was a class that proved itself to be eminently malleable and pragmatic in terms of religious faith.
It is also true that very often religious leaders wil dress up a conflict in religious terminology, but the reason why they do so should be eminently clear: they want buy-in from the population. Franklin Roosevelt--who, incidentally, invoked the Deity in his speeches and public utterances more often than any President since, including Dubya--frequently referred to World War II as the conflict between the Cross and the Swastika. But no one in their right mind would think World War II was a religious conflict.
Which brings me to Bill's other favorite example of religion-induced warfare: 9/11. Which is particularly timely, since apparently, we just killed Osama Bin Laden.
It is a capital mistake to point to 9/11 as an example of the abominable shit that the religious crazies are capable of, for the very simple reason that it obscures the real reasons for the anti-American rage in the region.
Again, it is true that Bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and the other leaders of Al Qaeda and other groups dress up their actions in religious rhetoric, which has led to a lot of nonsense in the West about how Muslims are inherently more violent than the rest of us, and how Islam is inherently more violent than all other faiths. Which is ludicrous. A religion is no more violent or peaceable than its practitioners.
But regardless of the rhetoric implied--or the faiths of the perpetrators--the fact remains that the peoples of the Middle East have very longstanding and legitimate grievances against us in the West, as the history of Western involvement and imperialism should teach us. It wouldn't matter if they were Mormons, Buddhists, or Jains. Given our actions in the region, they'd be bombing us.
This is not to say that the actions of 9/11 are legitimate or justified. Killing innocent people never is. But it sure as hell shouldn't have come as any surprise.
Our sins in the Middle East are legion. We prop up and support the most corrupt, brutal, backwards regimes for no better reason than they bastards we prop up give us cheap oil. And in doing so, we fan the flames of anti-Americanism that is, sadly, completely justified.
As I conclude this, I should point out that I am in no way defending religion. I think it should go away, and I'm not defending it any more than I would be defending cucumbers if you told me they cause leukemia. But if we are really serious about addressing human conflict, and ending the misery and suffering that it causes, it would, I think, be helpful to identify the real causes.
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