7 ms·

I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA. I hav

by Arun2009 7mo ago

I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA. I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering. It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.

vcryan 7mo ago
It had nothing to do with religion, that element is used to distract.
- merelythere 7mo ago
  They are following their books like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
ifwinterco 7mo ago
[flagged]
- samrus 7mo ago
  Isreal did have some polarization among liberal-conservative sides recently. Protests and all that. Could be
  - ifwinterco 7mo ago
    I'll know from how many downvotes I get whether I've touched a nerve or not
- azernik 7mo ago
  Hey there I'm Israeli and I'm quite politically informed and moderately religiously educated and I have never heard of this "curse of the eighth decade" thing you've heard of.
  - ifwinterco 7mo ago
    You probably know a lot more than me but my understanding is there have been two previous Jewish states in the Levant, the ancient Kingdom of Israel ruled by King David and then the Hasmonean dynasty during the Second Temple period. Both of those states lasted for around 80 years before collapsing. My (probably worthless) 2c is there's nothing magical or surprising about that, a lot of people have pointed out that political entities often last around the length of a human life before change occurs. The most prominent current theory is the Strauss–Howe "fourth turning" one but the idea goes back further than that
    - azernik 7mo ago
      Huh. Interesting. This is not a common narrative in Israeli discourse (especially since in that discourse David's kingdom is considered to have continued in the southern Kingdom of Judah, and to have lasted several centuries).
AbstractH24 7mo ago
> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA. Can you provide an example of this in 2026? It seems a little tenable with the ayatollah and Iran. But even here you don’t hear much talk of this being a war in the name of religion anymore. Nowhere near a few years ago and certainly nothing like 9/11 and the Taliban. And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way. Just a war defending people against attackers at the gates.
- samrus 7mo ago
  The evangelicals support isreal due to religious obligation. Project 2025, a christian nationalist policy advisement widely followed by the current regime, prescribes supporting isreal
  - swingboy 7mo ago
    Evangelicals point to Genesis 12:3 as justification but never seem to have ever read any of Galatians 3.
- kubb 7mo ago
  The land promised to the Israelites generally extends from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq/Syria, encompassing modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria and Saudi Arabia. If you're a religious Jew, then you believe you have a mandate from God (so an irrefutable right, or even obligation, needing no justification) to settle and rule not only the West Bank but the entire region. So there will always be that motivation, as long as religious Judaism exists in Israel.
  - azernik 7mo ago
    That is not the ruling Likud ideology in Israel nor the allied national religious ideology; both refer to Israel+Palestine+Golan as "the Whole Land of Israel". And in any case, the "most religious" (ie those whose politics are most totally driven by Judaism) bloc in Israel are at best ambivalent about the Israeli state and the settlement enterprise, and actively hostile to military service. Israeli hostility to Iran is driven by a "defensive" paranoia, not a religious mission.
jmyeet 7mo ago
> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA. This just isn't true. Religion is never the reason for these conflicts. It's the excuse. It's how that conflict is sold to the rest of the world. It's how civilians are manipulated into dying in a conflict. The source of these conflicts is always material. Always. Reagan's Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig once said [1]: > Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security. In 1986, then Senator and future president Joe Biden said [2]: > [Israel] is the best $3 billion ivnestment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to an invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. Much of US Middle East polciy was aimed to sabotaging and undermining Pan-Arab Nationalism (particularly under then Egyptian President Nasser) [3]. Nothing about any of this has anything to do with faith. In this case it's about oil. Whatever crimes you think Iran might've done, I'll stack up the US crimes against Iran and it won't even be close, including: 1. Iran was a liberal democracy that the US deposed in 1953 at the behest of the British because BP didn't want to have to pay higher royalties, ultimately leading Mossadegh wanting to "nationalize" their own oil; 2. In 1978, then US-puppet Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq. This was about the time the US realized that Iran was likely lost. it is believed that the reason for this was that a fundamentalist regime was preferred to a Communist one (which was otherwise the likely outcome) as the US didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. So all this pearl-clutching about the current regime rings hollow when you realize the US helped created it; 3. As punishment for the Revolution, the US supplied weapons to Iraq and fueled the Iran-Iraq war for almost a decade that killed over a million people; and 4. Crippling economic sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "starving people and denying them medical care", for daring not to be a US puppet. If you point me to any conflict you think is based on faith, I'll show you the material interests behind it. [1]: https://archive.ph/tMTBd https://archive.ph/tMTBd [2]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-biden-usa-would-have-to-invent-an-israel/4964168 https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b... [3]: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12/d40 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12...
- 7mo ago
violentapricot 7mo ago
It's not said in polite company, but Israeli concerns are racial, not religious. If you meet a Jewish zionist, then you've also met an athiest. An explanation of Christian Zionism deserves much longer discussion than can be made here, but how and why such an obvious contradiction to Jesus' ministry gained popularity is something worth studying.
- cogman10 7mo ago
  Once you realize the gospels and the epistles disagree, it becomes a lot easier to understand. Christianity is the practice of cognitive dissonance. The bible, due to the nature, has a lot of mixed messaging. Imagine, for example, you wanted to write the religion of Liberalism, so you collect the works of all the major thinkers on the subject of liberalism into one book. Now imagine someone gets the bad idea that all these authors must actually have a unified view on what liberalism is, means, and implies. You'll end up seeing that person teach a form of liberalism that's easily countered with other passages from their book and they'll mostly just wave it away because they have their passages and the others are simply you misinterpreting an "obvious" metaphor. That is christianity in a nutshell, just replace liberalism with god. That's why there are so many sects. Because it's just too easy to yell "Context context context!" when a difficult passage comes up you don't agree with and use "spiritual" as the excuse for why you don't actually have to follow that passage.
- azernik 7mo ago
  Not entirely accurate: 1. Many Israeli Jewish Zionists are either "traditional" (religious but not that much) or Religious Zionist, and they are generally part of the right wing coalition. Actual atheists tend to be in the Israeli (still-Zionist) left. 2. The Zionist conception of Jewish identity is not "racial" in the American sense. The most obvious sense in which this is true is that it considers converts and their descendants full members of the nation. Probably the closest analogies are some Native American nations' identities or Armenian nationalism. But you're directionally correct - Zionism is not a particularly religious ideology within the Jewish world, and outside of the Religious Zionist minority the political class is (openly!) on the less observant end even on the right.
cies 7mo ago
Religious concerns are, IMHO, always a facade for the underlying economic/territorial/geopolitical reasons. These religious facades help sell the war effort: get young men to enlist and fight to the death for "preserving their identity". And "muh freedom" is just as much a religious motivation to me (unsubstantiated, indoctrinated, unthreatened).
- eleventyseven 7mo ago
  Religion isn't the facade, it is the medium through which other reasons are transmitted
mkoubaa 7mo ago
Fallacy. (Wrong) Knife fight: a fight between people about knives (Right) Knife fight: a fight between people using knives
philistine 7mo ago
Religion poisons everything.
- lukifer 7mo ago
  Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes. There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik). Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
  - philistine 7mo ago
    Mythology does not equal religion. And the fact you feel a hole that religion fills for you doesn’t mean it’s there in everyone. Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
    - lukifer 7mo ago
      I don't disagree. I trimmed "religious and mythological memeplexes" down to avoid repetition. (Also worth considering: de-facto religious behaviors need not be supernatural or "mythological"; you can substitute your own examples of political ideologies that are difficult to distinguish from religions in practice.) It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples). To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't. > Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave. While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill). While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc. No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them. To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-beard_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-beard_effect [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iEWTx_APQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iEWTx_APQ4
misiek08 7mo ago
There is also point of view that remembers that always right behind US military there is a team building next oil pipeline. US tried to used China as cheap labor, lost a lot of intelligence and now - look at how much oil Iran has and who is it exporting to and what is the percentage at the destination. The numbers add up and only the funny (?) thing is - China is (going to) be most eco country, because they already use nuclear power a lot and were forced to work on that. What a time to be alive, again! And please, downvote me, comment that US is fighting for some country’s civilians freedom. It’s fun too.
ozgrakkurt 7mo ago
It makes a lot more sense if you picture a bunch of organized, strong and merciless chimps attacking some other chimps to plunder what they have. Chimps generally agree war is bad and horrific. But some smart, opportunistic and hard-working chimps can create situations that make war possible. Even though the war will only bring losses to most chimps on both sides.
- lioeters 7mo ago
  The best political insight in this thread. This is the planet of the apes. If any future historians are reading, some of us primates were aware of the absurdity of the situation, horrified by the senseless violence that erupts again and again, led by sociopathic chimps that somehow managed to organize whole societies against each other and profit from the whole primitive enterprise. What a waste of human potential.
rambojohnson 7mo ago
You’re mistaking the packaging for the product. Religion is the language leaders use. Power, territory, oil corridors, regional dominance, and domestic political survival are what they’re actually fighting over. Tehran isn’t calculating missile ranges based on sutras. Washington doesn’t position carrier groups because of metaphysics. Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat. Spiritual narratives make clean moral theater for the public. They mobilize bodies. They sanctify retaliation. But the machinery underneath runs on leverage and deterrence, not theology. Wake up to the real world. Calling it primarily religious violence feels tidy and tragic in a philosophical way. It’s harder, and more uncomfortable, to admit that it’s strategic violence dressed in symbols people recognize. Shunyata is a beautiful lens for seeing through ego. It doesn’t dissolve geopolitics.
- pphysch 7mo ago
  > Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat. "Security doctrine" is quite a euphemism for aggressive territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing, which is tightly wrapped in religious rhetoric.
  - rambojohnson 7mo ago
    religious rhetoric is for the fools they've indoctrinated to their cause. it does not drive policy. I was being sardonic with "security doctrine".
    - 2snakes 7mo ago
      I do this too. I think it is basically simulation out of fear. (modeling because of uncomfortableness with thinking with System 1 fast emotional / System 2 slow rational)
    - thisislife2 7mo ago
      Israel today is run by a group of religious fundamentalists who do believe it is their "promised" land. And then we have an American ambassador publicly supporting this because he thinks that as a Christian he needs to support Israel's "Biblical rights" over the all of middle-east!
nonethewiser 7mo ago
I have a very hard time understanding how the US is attacking Iran because of Christianity. I cannot even anticipate the hypothesis.
- js2 7mo ago
  America's Evangelical Christian Right: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-prophecy-cec https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p... https://archive.ph/Pz81T https://archive.ph/Pz81T Huckabee one week ago: "Citing the book of Genesis, Carlson asked whether the modern state of Israel had a right to the lands promised in the Bible by God to Abraham, stretching from the Euphrates River to the Nile, covering much of the Middle East. In response, Huckabee said: “It would be fine if they took it all. But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.” https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/21/mike-huckabee-claims-israel-has-a-right-to-much-of-the-middle-east.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/21/mike-huckabee-claims-israel-...
throw0101c 7mo ago
> Buddhism No one lives up to their ideals on a day-to-day basis: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
HerbManic 7mo ago
When it comes to battles of religion, Alan watts said it best. "Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."
jackcosgrove 7mo ago
Complexity can lead to "more is different" outcomes at higher strata. I would not say reified concepts are "made up" as they can have very real effects on both higher and lower strata. The fallacy of reification is treating something emergent as a thing-unto-itself rather than a process or interaction born from constituents at a lower stratum. A reified thing can be recognized and changed for this reason. A mental concept needs only a change of mind to mutate, or to be destroyed. Religion may well prove to be a reification that is destroyed once it is recognized as such. But I do believe that you cannot reduce that which is real and not real to only those things that have physical antecedents at lower strata, as we see emergent phenomena in the physical world as well.
gib444 7mo ago
It makes you wonder about religion's true purpose. It's a really convenient framework for creating peoples/regions that hate each other, isn't it, as history has shown for millenia
monarchwadia 7mo ago
It is rare to find a comment on shunyata on HN. I wanted to deepen the discussion on that, instead of move into geopolitics or the justification of status quo reality. I think youre very correct that war is unnecessary, if only we realize the illusory nature of many of the things we desire or hate. Shunyata means everything is empty. Empty of what? Empty of inherent, independent existence. That means everything is connected -- not only connected, but mostly illusory, sitting on top of a reality that cannot be understood in terms of objects, processes, distinctions, or boundaries between objects. Sometimes, this connection takes on strange forms. For example: The horrible reality of war was a direct cause for your compassionate unease. I.e. war acted as a cause for compassion. This is strange. How do we reconcile this disturbing relationship, where a compassionate response is directly the child of war? In other words, horrific war has given rise to compassion, and this is a causal relationship, in the same way that a child arises from a mother. So, violence and love can arise from each other? What? Are they not supposed to be opposites? The next step is a bit more provocative. Shunyata seems to imply that, since everything lacks inherent and independence existence, then suffering is not a part of the human condition. Instead, it is a mental construct. It isn't that the suffering of humanity does not exist; it's that it is constructed by the mind. Deleuze and Guattari offers an interesting viewpoint on this. There are various intensities that do arise naturally. Injury, for example, is an intensity. But, suffering itself is not "really-real" unless we reify the intensities as suffering. And eliminating suffering partially involves the non-reification of intensities into suffering. Obviously, easier said than done. Anyway I'll leave it there. It's probably quite easy to destroy my points here, so I would appreciate it if people steelmanned my comment instead of strawmanning it. Shunyata is a genuinely useful discussion from a mental health and human flourishing standpoint. And has some very interesting and rigorous logic behind it. (see Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna)

vcryan 7mo ago

It had nothing to do with religion, that element is used to distract.

merelythere 7mo ago
They are following their books like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

ifwinterco 7mo ago

[flagged]

samrus 7mo ago
Isreal did have some polarization among liberal-conservative sides recently. Protests and all that. Could be
- ifwinterco 7mo ago
  I'll know from how many downvotes I get whether I've touched a nerve or not
azernik 7mo ago
Hey there I'm Israeli and I'm quite politically informed and moderately religiously educated and I have never heard of this "curse of the eighth decade" thing you've heard of.
- ifwinterco 7mo ago
  You probably know a lot more than me but my understanding is there have been two previous Jewish states in the Levant, the ancient Kingdom of Israel ruled by King David and then the Hasmonean dynasty during the Second Temple period. Both of those states lasted for around 80 years before collapsing. My (probably worthless) 2c is there's nothing magical or surprising about that, a lot of people have pointed out that political entities often last around the length of a human life before change occurs. The most prominent current theory is the Strauss–Howe "fourth turning" one but the idea goes back further than that
  - azernik 7mo ago
    Huh. Interesting. This is not a common narrative in Israeli discourse (especially since in that discourse David's kingdom is considered to have continued in the southern Kingdom of Judah, and to have lasted several centuries).

AbstractH24 7mo ago

> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA. Can you provide an example of this in 2026? It seems a little tenable with the ayatollah and Iran. But even here you don’t hear much talk of this being a war in the name of religion anymore. Nowhere near a few years ago and certainly nothing like 9/11 and the Taliban. And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way. Just a war defending people against attackers at the gates.

samrus 7mo ago
The evangelicals support isreal due to religious obligation. Project 2025, a christian nationalist policy advisement widely followed by the current regime, prescribes supporting isreal
- swingboy 7mo ago
  Evangelicals point to Genesis 12:3 as justification but never seem to have ever read any of Galatians 3.
kubb 7mo ago
The land promised to the Israelites generally extends from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq/Syria, encompassing modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria and Saudi Arabia. If you're a religious Jew, then you believe you have a mandate from God (so an irrefutable right, or even obligation, needing no justification) to settle and rule not only the West Bank but the entire region. So there will always be that motivation, as long as religious Judaism exists in Israel.
- azernik 7mo ago
  That is not the ruling Likud ideology in Israel nor the allied national religious ideology; both refer to Israel+Palestine+Golan as "the Whole Land of Israel". And in any case, the "most religious" (ie those whose politics are most totally driven by Judaism) bloc in Israel are at best ambivalent about the Israeli state and the settlement enterprise, and actively hostile to military service. Israeli hostility to Iran is driven by a "defensive" paranoia, not a religious mission.

jmyeet 7mo ago

> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA. This just isn't true. Religion is never the reason for these conflicts. It's the excuse. It's how that conflict is sold to the rest of the world. It's how civilians are manipulated into dying in a conflict. The source of these conflicts is always material. Always. Reagan's Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig once said [1]: > Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security. In 1986, then Senator and future president Joe Biden said [2]: > [Israel] is the best $3 billion ivnestment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to an invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. Much of US Middle East polciy was aimed to sabotaging and undermining Pan-Arab Nationalism (particularly under then Egyptian President Nasser) [3]. Nothing about any of this has anything to do with faith. In this case it's about oil. Whatever crimes you think Iran might've done, I'll stack up the US crimes against Iran and it won't even be close, including: 1. Iran was a liberal democracy that the US deposed in 1953 at the behest of the British because BP didn't want to have to pay higher royalties, ultimately leading Mossadegh wanting to "nationalize" their own oil; 2. In 1978, then US-puppet Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq. This was about the time the US realized that Iran was likely lost. it is believed that the reason for this was that a fundamentalist regime was preferred to a Communist one (which was otherwise the likely outcome) as the US didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. So all this pearl-clutching about the current regime rings hollow when you realize the US helped created it; 3. As punishment for the Revolution, the US supplied weapons to Iraq and fueled the Iran-Iraq war for almost a decade that killed over a million people; and 4. Crippling economic sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "starving people and denying them medical care", for daring not to be a US puppet. If you point me to any conflict you think is based on faith, I'll show you the material interests behind it. [1]: https://archive.ph/tMTBd https://archive.ph/tMTBd [2]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-biden-usa-would-have-to-invent-an-israel/4964168 https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b... [3]: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12/d40 https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12...

7mo ago

violentapricot 7mo ago

It's not said in polite company, but Israeli concerns are racial, not religious. If you meet a Jewish zionist, then you've also met an athiest. An explanation of Christian Zionism deserves much longer discussion than can be made here, but how and why such an obvious contradiction to Jesus' ministry gained popularity is something worth studying.

cogman10 7mo ago
Once you realize the gospels and the epistles disagree, it becomes a lot easier to understand. Christianity is the practice of cognitive dissonance. The bible, due to the nature, has a lot of mixed messaging. Imagine, for example, you wanted to write the religion of Liberalism, so you collect the works of all the major thinkers on the subject of liberalism into one book. Now imagine someone gets the bad idea that all these authors must actually have a unified view on what liberalism is, means, and implies. You'll end up seeing that person teach a form of liberalism that's easily countered with other passages from their book and they'll mostly just wave it away because they have their passages and the others are simply you misinterpreting an "obvious" metaphor. That is christianity in a nutshell, just replace liberalism with god. That's why there are so many sects. Because it's just too easy to yell "Context context context!" when a difficult passage comes up you don't agree with and use "spiritual" as the excuse for why you don't actually have to follow that passage.
azernik 7mo ago
Not entirely accurate: 1. Many Israeli Jewish Zionists are either "traditional" (religious but not that much) or Religious Zionist, and they are generally part of the right wing coalition. Actual atheists tend to be in the Israeli (still-Zionist) left. 2. The Zionist conception of Jewish identity is not "racial" in the American sense. The most obvious sense in which this is true is that it considers converts and their descendants full members of the nation. Probably the closest analogies are some Native American nations' identities or Armenian nationalism. But you're directionally correct - Zionism is not a particularly religious ideology within the Jewish world, and outside of the Religious Zionist minority the political class is (openly!) on the less observant end even on the right.

cies 7mo ago

Religious concerns are, IMHO, always a facade for the underlying economic/territorial/geopolitical reasons. These religious facades help sell the war effort: get young men to enlist and fight to the death for "preserving their identity". And "muh freedom" is just as much a religious motivation to me (unsubstantiated, indoctrinated, unthreatened).

eleventyseven 7mo ago
Religion isn't the facade, it is the medium through which other reasons are transmitted

mkoubaa 7mo ago

Fallacy. (Wrong) Knife fight: a fight between people about knives (Right) Knife fight: a fight between people using knives

philistine 7mo ago

Religion poisons everything.

lukifer 7mo ago
Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes. There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik). Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
- philistine 7mo ago
  Mythology does not equal religion. And the fact you feel a hole that religion fills for you doesn’t mean it’s there in everyone. Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
  - lukifer 7mo ago
    I don't disagree. I trimmed "religious and mythological memeplexes" down to avoid repetition. (Also worth considering: de-facto religious behaviors need not be supernatural or "mythological"; you can substitute your own examples of political ideologies that are difficult to distinguish from religions in practice.) It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples). To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't. > Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave. While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill). While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc. No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them. To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-beard_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-beard_effect [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iEWTx_APQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iEWTx_APQ4

misiek08 7mo ago

There is also point of view that remembers that always right behind US military there is a team building next oil pipeline. US tried to used China as cheap labor, lost a lot of intelligence and now - look at how much oil Iran has and who is it exporting to and what is the percentage at the destination. The numbers add up and only the funny (?) thing is - China is (going to) be most eco country, because they already use nuclear power a lot and were forced to work on that. What a time to be alive, again! And please, downvote me, comment that US is fighting for some country’s civilians freedom. It’s fun too.

ozgrakkurt 7mo ago

It makes a lot more sense if you picture a bunch of organized, strong and merciless chimps attacking some other chimps to plunder what they have. Chimps generally agree war is bad and horrific. But some smart, opportunistic and hard-working chimps can create situations that make war possible. Even though the war will only bring losses to most chimps on both sides.

lioeters 7mo ago
The best political insight in this thread. This is the planet of the apes. If any future historians are reading, some of us primates were aware of the absurdity of the situation, horrified by the senseless violence that erupts again and again, led by sociopathic chimps that somehow managed to organize whole societies against each other and profit from the whole primitive enterprise. What a waste of human potential.

rambojohnson 7mo ago

You’re mistaking the packaging for the product. Religion is the language leaders use. Power, territory, oil corridors, regional dominance, and domestic political survival are what they’re actually fighting over. Tehran isn’t calculating missile ranges based on sutras. Washington doesn’t position carrier groups because of metaphysics. Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat. Spiritual narratives make clean moral theater for the public. They mobilize bodies. They sanctify retaliation. But the machinery underneath runs on leverage and deterrence, not theology. Wake up to the real world. Calling it primarily religious violence feels tidy and tragic in a philosophical way. It’s harder, and more uncomfortable, to admit that it’s strategic violence dressed in symbols people recognize. Shunyata is a beautiful lens for seeing through ego. It doesn’t dissolve geopolitics.

pphysch 7mo ago
> Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat. "Security doctrine" is quite a euphemism for aggressive territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing, which is tightly wrapped in religious rhetoric.
- rambojohnson 7mo ago
  religious rhetoric is for the fools they've indoctrinated to their cause. it does not drive policy. I was being sardonic with "security doctrine".
  - 2snakes 7mo ago
    I do this too. I think it is basically simulation out of fear. (modeling because of uncomfortableness with thinking with System 1 fast emotional / System 2 slow rational)
  - thisislife2 7mo ago
    Israel today is run by a group of religious fundamentalists who do believe it is their "promised" land. And then we have an American ambassador publicly supporting this because he thinks that as a Christian he needs to support Israel's "Biblical rights" over the all of middle-east!

nonethewiser 7mo ago

I have a very hard time understanding how the US is attacking Iran because of Christianity. I cannot even anticipate the hypothesis.

js2 7mo ago
America's Evangelical Christian Right: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-prophecy-cec https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p... https://archive.ph/Pz81T https://archive.ph/Pz81T Huckabee one week ago: "Citing the book of Genesis, Carlson asked whether the modern state of Israel had a right to the lands promised in the Bible by God to Abraham, stretching from the Euphrates River to the Nile, covering much of the Middle East. In response, Huckabee said: “It would be fine if they took it all. But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.” https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/21/mike-huckabee-claims-israel-has-a-right-to-much-of-the-middle-east.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/21/mike-huckabee-claims-israel-...

throw0101c 7mo ago

> Buddhism No one lives up to their ideals on a day-to-day basis: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

HerbManic 7mo ago

When it comes to battles of religion, Alan watts said it best. "Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."

jackcosgrove 7mo ago

Complexity can lead to "more is different" outcomes at higher strata. I would not say reified concepts are "made up" as they can have very real effects on both higher and lower strata. The fallacy of reification is treating something emergent as a thing-unto-itself rather than a process or interaction born from constituents at a lower stratum. A reified thing can be recognized and changed for this reason. A mental concept needs only a change of mind to mutate, or to be destroyed. Religion may well prove to be a reification that is destroyed once it is recognized as such. But I do believe that you cannot reduce that which is real and not real to only those things that have physical antecedents at lower strata, as we see emergent phenomena in the physical world as well.

gib444 7mo ago

It makes you wonder about religion's true purpose. It's a really convenient framework for creating peoples/regions that hate each other, isn't it, as history has shown for millenia

monarchwadia 7mo ago

It is rare to find a comment on shunyata on HN. I wanted to deepen the discussion on that, instead of move into geopolitics or the justification of status quo reality. I think youre very correct that war is unnecessary, if only we realize the illusory nature of many of the things we desire or hate. Shunyata means everything is empty. Empty of what? Empty of inherent, independent existence. That means everything is connected -- not only connected, but mostly illusory, sitting on top of a reality that cannot be understood in terms of objects, processes, distinctions, or boundaries between objects. Sometimes, this connection takes on strange forms. For example: The horrible reality of war was a direct cause for your compassionate unease. I.e. war acted as a cause for compassion. This is strange. How do we reconcile this disturbing relationship, where a compassionate response is directly the child of war? In other words, horrific war has given rise to compassion, and this is a causal relationship, in the same way that a child arises from a mother. So, violence and love can arise from each other? What? Are they not supposed to be opposites? The next step is a bit more provocative. Shunyata seems to imply that, since everything lacks inherent and independence existence, then suffering is not a part of the human condition. Instead, it is a mental construct. It isn't that the suffering of humanity does not exist; it's that it is constructed by the mind. Deleuze and Guattari offers an interesting viewpoint on this. There are various intensities that do arise naturally. Injury, for example, is an intensity. But, suffering itself is not "really-real" unless we reify the intensities as suffering. And eliminating suffering partially involves the non-reification of intensities into suffering. Obviously, easier said than done. Anyway I'll leave it there. It's probably quite easy to destroy my points here, so I would appreciate it if people steelmanned my comment instead of strawmanning it. Shunyata is a genuinely useful discussion from a mental health and human flourishing standpoint. And has some very interesting and rigorous logic behind it. (see Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna)