Skip to main content

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.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more