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Other People"s Religious Wars are Too Much Like Our Own


One can become weary
fighting other people's religious wars.
(It is bad enough fighting one's own.)

What is worse is getting involved
without knowing what it is all about.
That is us, fighting in the Middle East.

A long time ago--
before Hector was a pup--
when Muhammad died,
the question was who should succeed him.
It was a family dispute.
(It is even worse getting into someone else's family fights.)

A large part of the family,
centered around Saudi Arabia,
are now called Sunnis.
A smaller part of the family,
now identified with Iran and part of Iraq,
are now called Shiites.
Everybody in the family chooses sides,
and every few hundred years,
they shoot at each other.

Christians know all about that kind of stuff:
once it was the Christians loyal to Rome,
and the Christians loyal to Constantinople and,
later, Moscow.  West and East.  Oh, dear Lord!
Then it was a division among those in the West:
those loyal to Rome, and the Protestants.
They shot at each other, too (so to speak).

Only a few years ago, when we were
much more dependent on foreign oil than now,
we pretended we were only interested in
lending a little law and order to Iraq,
so we invaded to "take care of Saddam Hussein"
(which coincided with his oil fields).

Ever since, we have scrambled about,
trying to figure out who is whom,
because in a religious war, war is never about things logical:
it is about East and West, Rome and Constantinople,
Catholic and Protestant, Saudi Arabia and Iran,
Sunni and Shia, God and the Great Satan,
and sending our kids to die for other people"s religion
(which is oddly similar to sending them to die for ours).

Even today, for instance, Donald Trump says
"we should have kept the oil", whatever that means:
does he think all the oil is in a large tank,
or that we should have left with orders for
whoever was fighting with each other to
send the oil to us in ships?

Do we really think there are any good guys,
either here or over there?  Do we really think, at all?
When we prattle on about this being a Christian nation,
and all those other guys being . . . oh . . . not real Americans
like we are, we are just mucking around in our own religious wars,
not a bit more sensible nor righteous than what is happening now
in Syria, and Turkey, and Yemen, and Lebanon, and everywhere
where people hitch up their pants and burkas and vow
that God is on their side.  Does anyone think
that if there were a god, he or she would declare war against
the other half of his or her zealous believers?

It makes fighting for oil almost rational,
and we don't need the oil, either.

Maybe we cannot ignore what is happening in the Middle East,
but we should not delude ourselves about what the real issues are,
there or here.



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