this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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So, different flavors of religious nonsense, with variant relative degrees of fundamentalism and wingnuttery.
I know that Hezbollah is not the same thing as ISIS; but religion and politics is never a good combo, and it never has been (it’s a tool wielded by politicians to influence people, and we’d all be better off without it).
For example, the Palestinian / Israeli conflict is one that needs to be resolved, and Palestinians have a right to exist in prosperity and peace with their neighbors, as do Jews.
The conversation about how Israel and Palestine can coexist peacefully, and what to do about land, and all that, is not served by debates about whether or not The Prophet ascended to Heaven on a winged horse at the site of Al Aqsa / The Temple Mount, and whether or not rebuilding the Temple Mount will bring about the Eschaton / the Return of Christ / Armageddon, and whether or not The Madhi will be there too, and so on. That hocus pocus bullshit just severely muddies the waters for everybody.
If you were in Gaza right now, would you feel that the Al-Qassam brigades who were actively fighting off the IDF invasion, literally the only people between your family and obliteration, are "fundamentalism and wingnuttery"? If you were in southern Lebanon, after each generation of your family being devastated by losing siblings and children to Israel "mowing the lawn" every couple of years, would you think that Hezbollah is only there to control you even as they successfully fend off the 2024 invasion?
Then explain why OG Zionists like Herzl as well as influential Israeli politicians like Meir and Ben-Gurion were atheist Jews who don't even believe in God. They obviously didn't need to believe in God before stealing land from the Palestinians and justifying their theft from a God they don't even believe in.
Western hypocrisy is what it is
It's still not wrong to say that religion forms the majority of the basis in popular media for the "legitimacy" of the existence of Israel, and also a part in the "legitimacy" of the Palestinian cause.
Huh, I didn’t know that.
This is a mischaracterization of the conflict. Israel is hardly backed by religious logic. There are mixed views among the Haredim who live within occupied Palestine, most of whom actually oppose the existence of the Zionist state.
You're talking with a Catholic who believes the complete opposite of whatever this is. There is no such thing as a monolithic view among Christians as to ethnic relocations or the creation of ethnostates (although if you ask me, I'd say ethnic cleansing is wrong
)
Profoundly anti-materialist reading of the world. Read Marx and Engels, please. I'd start with Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Can liberals stop doing the
atheist "If they just stopped believing in a freaking sky wizard, the whole conflict would end 
" condescending garbage? Religion isn't the cause.
If that was the case ,then our first resistance groups wouldn’t have been secular but they were
It wouldn’t resolve all conflict. Sociopaths would continue to exist, as would material conflicts and ethnic tensions and so on.
But it would remove one large confounding variable. It would make a difference. How much exact difference, I’m not sure, but a non-zero difference.
Religious / cult-captured minds are the most difficult to appeal to. And by the way, not all cults are spiritual or metaphysical in nature (as I’ve learned by talking with my MAGA neighbors), but again, one less impediment. Half of my MAGA neighbors’ “reasoning” stems from fucking religion (the other half from a personality cult plus identity politics).
The religious/ideological conflicts that you're talking about are only the superstructural manifestations of contradictions that exist within the material base. Israeli settles aren't joining the IDF because they read it on the Talmud. Gazan youngsters aren't joining the resistance because they read it on the Quran. They are engaging in a struggle that is a part of the global imperialist system, founded on material conditions of colonialist violence and the displacement of indigenous people across the globe. This struggle takes place across multiple dimensions of identity, including religion, ethnicity, gender, and other such factors, but you must understand that these dimensions are not the primary contradiction across which we are to understand the conflict, but across class. It is the class character of the settlers and the resistance that actually informs the struggle and helps us understand how a resolution could take place. The utopian fantasy of a world where "everyone just stops believing in nonsense" is completely useless liberal claptrap.
That’s a good response.
I don’t know. I do know that the MAGA world in which I live (the southern US) is inundated with religion, like fish are inundated with water, and it’s religion that is used by the elites to influence regular folks.
(Btw, I may be a right-wing shitlib relative to you guys, but out here where I live I’m basically a commie. It’s relative.)
So yeah, maybe all this is colored by my own experiences. I’m not a Middle East expert by any stretch. But I do have an axe to grind. I admit that.
Every discussion with MAGA eventually invokes religion in some way, explicitly or implicitly. And it is severely frustrating and exhausting. If I talk about “material conditions” (as best I can, I’m not brilliant about these things either), e.g., collective bargaining, taxing wealth instead of labor, how spreading health care coverage risk across the entire population and detangling insurance from employment actually frees people to start small businesses, and so on, they’ll nod along with me, and say things like they “actually like Bernie,” but eventually the conversation gets turned to some culture war issue informed by religion. I have to keep Bible quotes in my memory just to talk with these people and rebut their culture war bullshit.
I fucking hate it, man. The churches, mosques, and synagogues, how I hate them. 🔥🔥🔥
Maybe I didn’t belong in this thread. I’ve never been to the Middle East.
There’s a part of me that would like to see all priests, mullahs, and rabbis strung up and hanged, and every church, mosque, and synagogue set ablaze. I guess that’s not very Liberal or Progressive of me (or Socialist or Social Democratic either, for that matter, even though I don’t label myself that way, especially around here), and I should work on that. Maybe it’s not healthy or helpful, and writing things helped me examine it a bit more closely.
I can empathize. I don't live in the US, but where I am, we are ruled by a right wing comprador colonial government that also uses religion to justify itself.
I think you're doing good work by trying to focus on material conditions when talking with the people around you. That's the most important thing. If they focus on culture war issues, I think it often is the best approach to try to circumvent direct engagement with those topics (still unequivocally say that trans rights are human rights, gay people deserve marriage and not recognizing their marriage is a slippery slope to invalidating all other kinds of marriage that aren't between two aryans in a Lebensraum homestead, etc) and to try to steer the conversation into the actual nature of power and authority. At the end of the day, you aren't gonna achieve anything by convincing them to agree with the Democratic agenda, and even voting for Bernie is largely useless. The goal is to bring them into the fold in a socialist movement through mutual aid programs, direct action, agitation, education, and whatever other arenas of struggle are available to advance the cause. Getting them to be perfect is not a necessary part of that process.
As a life long atheist, trying to reduce the genocide of Palestinians to just "different sky daddies" is Reddit cringe.
Newsflash buddy, you agree with Hamas.
From the 2017 Hamas Charter
Westoid
The Jews should go back to Germany. That's the solution, it's not about religion, it's about a bunch of Germans invading another country.
That's not true!
Many of them were Poles.