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> looking for an example of a religious conflict
> guy offers me one
> ask if it's a religious conflict or an ethnic conflict where religion is an ethnic marker
> guy laughs and says it's a good example
> look inside
> ethnic conflict
oh god why did this post blow up? [over on twitter]
well, i'll elaborate a little.
i'm not saying religious conflicts don't exist, but it is frustrating when certain well-known examples are framed as if religion is the key thing. religion is inescapable as a dynamic but is it the dynamic?
most of all it's an argument against the idea that if people were irreligious, these conflicts wouldn't happen. i'm not convinced!
it's funny though because beyond a certain point it's just a semantic argument. identities are correlated. you could make the same joke in reverse!
it gets messy once you have stuff like, a religion being used to construct a new national identity. now your conflict over religion is also a conflict over ethnicity.
humans are just really good at socially constructing new identities and then going to war over them
the wonderful thing about this world is that there are an endless number of different lenses that you can analyse any particular thing though, and they're all right in their own way
puts on really silly looking hat don't you see. everything is politics. every conflict is about whether the other side can Pokémon Go To The Polls, with bullets. every conflict is about whether you will lose the mandate of heaven (Democratic nomination)
yet another way to look at it is that religions aren't just religions. there is a reason the catholic church has a seat at the un. but we could be here all day
@hikari they do???
@whitequark @hikari the Vatican is a country
@whitequark @canteen yes, but vatican city is not a member of the un :)
the holy see is :)
@whitequark @canteen oh, correction, the holy see is not a member but it is a “permanent observer state”, which is very funny because it is not a state
@hikari @whitequark I am learning a lot today
@canteen @whitequark fun fact: catholics are also responsible for that other weird quasi-state entity, the sovereign military order of malta, which is basically a government-in-exile???