Infernova Bolgia VIII

The corresponding realm in The Infernova is for the practitioners of Sectarian Violence - those that used their religious ideas as an excuse for ongoing wars with neighboring peoples that happen to have a different worldview. Of course, they often have only a slightly different worldview, mind you. How different, really, are the beliefs of Shiite and Sunni Muslims, when you normalize this against how much they have in common?

Comments

There is a short chapter in John Steinbeck's book Sweet Thursday called The Great Roque War. It describes a one-time peaceful California coastal town peopled with retires, that is given a pair of roque (a lawn game similar to croquet) courts by a philanthropist named Mr. Deems. Before long, the town is divided into two warring teams, the Blues and the Greens. The mutual dislike spreads well beyond the field of play, to the point where each group shuns the other, they each take up different sides of the aisle in church, and eventually, violent confrontations occur. The poor man that unwittingly started it all finally solves the problem by taking the roque courts away via a backhoe, which prompts the Blues and Greens to band together, run him out of town, and burn his effigy once a year.

Or as they say over at www.despair.com, "As long as we have each other, we'll never run out of problems."

Is religious belief the root cause of the human propensity to war with tribes not our own? I would not claim that, of course. I'd think it is reasonable to expect that we evolved under pressures that made within-group amity and between-group enmity basic rules for interaction. What religion has done, more often than not, is solidify the xenophobia and provide a systematic way to rationalize the assertions of superiority and to motivate the rank and file to be willing to die.