Ladies and gentlemen! There is no need to fight, come to the white base assembly
Too true
Late reply, but beautiful!
This is unironically the case in the muslim world today. Different groups killing each other in the bloodiest ways over the most miniscule differences.
you underestimate Shia/Sunni animosity.
It’s weird that you can’t see that the metaphor is for all religions.
Here’s a great one to make you think about Christianity’s version. https://youtu.be/l3fAcxcxoZ8?is=uoOwcuz4AbAdHW4l
The Shi’a Sunni sectarianism was helped (at least in Syria) by the US government.
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06DAMASCUS5399_a.html
it was a thing for centuries before that
Yup, which is extremely similar to Christians and their “European wars of religion” that had them slaughtering each other for hundreds of years, and more recently “the Troubles” until 1998.
Jews aren’t above it either, though their examples are more biblical and not nearly the same body count. The Samaritans and the schism that turned into Christianity come to mind.
The troubles definitely had religious overtones and justifications, but it was a war about colonial control and cultural repression. You’d be hard pressed to find a British soldier who was fighting to defend protestantism instead of “the empire” or the queen, and you’d be hard pressed to find an IRA member who cared more about Catholic dominance in Ireland than independence.
The wars of religion basically used religion as a cudgel in a fight to dominate Europe and over tensions between the power centers of the Vatican and European royal courts. Entirely political but with religious marketing and pageantry.
Even the Sunni/Shia conflict, most Sunnis and Shias around the world have no issue with each other. Most of the time there’s violence assigned to sectarianism, it’s just like Ireland and Europe, that sectarian divide is inflamed by bad actors instigating artificial tensions and then using them to justify political and economic conquest. ISIS wanted to get rich by snapping up all the oil fields in a largely lawless region. Iran wants regional political dominance and economic control over the straight of hormuz. Israel wants to control the entire Middle East apparently. All of them have religious overtones to the conflict but the religion isn’t the reason for the conflict.
The last real religious wars were the crusades. Europe stood to gain nothing but “God’s favor” by taking back the holy land, it was nothing but a burden to repeatedly invade and fund intermittently occupying. Going back further, Muhammad’s early Muslim conquests are another example of a true “religious war”.
Weren’t the crusades also just a Papal project to reduce the intensity of European wars by dumping excess military capacity into colonising the Middle East?
I mean Hindus are also like this. The amount hatred and violence over being born into different casts is disgusting, though I’m not as familiar with it or other religions. I come from an islamic background
Caste isn’t formally used in India anymore, was abolished a while ago. Could be a cultural thing but that will fade with time
From what I’ve been told it’s still a pretty persistent cultural problem, but I’m not Indian, so take that with a grain of salt.
The Thirty Year War was quite a while ago but until fairly recently there was real animosity between Catholics and Protestants in Germany.
“Today”
Isn’t it the crusades as well?
Classic.
They need to update their banners.
This take on it is especially weird to me because I initially saw the young face, but as soon as I saw the old one it became impossible to see the “ear” as anything but an eye.
I can still kinda see the young face but the ear doesn’t compute anymore. it feels wrong.
She’s waering an ear bud
That one is creepy!
What else am I supposed to see besides a lady with a hat?
Easier to show this way,
One view: young lady. We see her from the back, looking away from the “camera”, her left ear towards us, wearing a necklace
Other view: old lady. Instead of the left ear, the same point served as the eye, the necklace instead serving as the mouth
I know you’re not responsible for this:
But what old lady wears a frill around their chin?
Conclusion: The young lady is real, the old lady is the illusion.
And what is the shoulder part of her clothes doing in front of her? Either it’s the young woman or the old wears weird clothes or can twist her neck in a creepy way
In the old woman version you’re supposed to see it as a ruffled collar and her head as angled down, her chin kind of sitting on the collar
Ear is eye, Chin is nose, Necklace is mouth
It’s young lady with a hat facing away and an old lady with a hat facing to the side. Young lady’s ear is old lady’s eye, young lady’s nose is a mole-like bump on old lady’s nose, and so on. Never liked this one personally, the old lady is too much of a stretch for my brain to accept.
Yeah… I’m having a hard time making out the old lady
The young woman’s chin is the old woman’s nose
An old lady with a hat
It took me ~10 seconds to figure out how those banners work. Nice.
What do you mean how they work? It’s obviously the banners of the duck god and rabbit god.
All hail the mighty duck god! Death to the rabbit god infidels.
I still don’t get it. Look completely identical besides orientation. But both look like duck to me.
It’s this, literally:
TIL. Thanks for the reference!
The duck’s bill becomes the rabbit’s ears and then the rabbit is looking the other way (and you can’t see its mouth)
Did you just compare my Duck to the heathens Rabbit? BLASPHEMER!
🤦♂️now I see it. Thank you!
Anyone else certain team Rabbit is in the foreground, with team duck the group further away?
I’ve been going back and forth and can’t find the rabbit symbolism
A true duck believer!!
Ears stick to the left, rabbit faces right.
“Wait, wait… stop… STOP!”
“Now, who’s carrying the DUCK banner, and who’s carrying t’other?”
(insert Monty Python, please)
The guy in the lower side of the image is the one talking.
But what about the Great Green Arkleseizure
Fun fact: Allah means God.
More than that: Judaism, Christianity and Islam all believe in the same god and the same creation story (more or less). Not to mention, different denominations within each religion (e.g. Catholic, Protestant for Christianity). It seems these shared beliefs don’t really contribute to any kind of peace.
I’m trying to get away from my radical atheist days, but monotheism specifically seems to definitively not play well with others.
radical atheist
“hello, have you heard about our savior, ‘just not being an asshole’?”
door slams
“obviously fucking not”
If you don’t think there is such a thing as radical atheism, you might be in a radically atheistic echo chamber. There absolutely is a way to take it too far. For example, thinking that all religions should be abolished forever.
Personally I am also an atheist bordering on radical :D
I’d rather educate religion away than oppress it, but I do think we’d be better off without any kind of supernatural belief. I know that’s a radical, extreme position.
You sound like those radical geocentrics.
It seems these shared beliefs don’t really contribute to any kind of peace.
I mean, that’s because very few conflicts are fought over religion on its own. It’s usually part of a larger fight, at which point the larger fight will need to be resolved even if both sides believe in similar religions. Besides, since peace is the absence of conflict, it’s always going to be impossible to tell if it contributing to some kind of peace because you can’t know which conflicts aren’t being fought. You can always have more
racereligion wars.I think you’re ignoring the importance of religious identity as the definitive motivating factor in a lot conflict, but I agree that sometimes it plays a more minor role.
I mean, examples? Pretty much every ostensibly religious example I can think of off the top of my head is fundamentally driven by something else. Now that doesn’t make religion unimportant in these conflicts, but it’s not definitive and it’s entirely possible and/or likely other fault lines would’ve been found instead.
Having been through this conversation regarding slavery and the US Civil War, the tool we need is necessary and sufficient. Is a proposed cause of the war necessary for the war to have started? And is the proposed cause alone enough, by itself, to have started the war? If both conditions are true, then you can say that is the cause of the war.
I think if you look at least of a few of the European Crusades into Holy Land, you’ll see religion meets this standard.
Disclaimer: I think it’s obviously true that at least some conflicts can be considered to have been caused by religion, my issue is more in how common and how big those conflicts are.
So there are two problems here: First is the fact that these hypotheticals for the most part can’t be untangled with any degree of objectivity. Second is the question of how to evaluate religion’s impact on direction versus magnitude. Which is to say, it’s entirely possible that you have the conditions for a war that simply need something to shape them into a coherent conflict. Your example is actually pretty illustrative here, so lemme just:
I think if you look at least of a few of the European Crusades into Holy Land, you’ll see religion meets this standard.
The problem here is that religion was so tied up in the culture and institutions of the time that it’s nearly impossible to envision a Medieval Europe without religion (see first problem). The thing about the Crusades is that they were directed by the Church, which was eager to assert its influence, and you don’t even have the Church without religion. But then you don’t get nothing, because the other thing the Church was doing was trying to reduce conflict between Christians, so the Crusades were essentially the Church redirecting this violence externally; without that you don’t get less conflict, just different conflict (see second problem). Historically the lack of overarching authority to direct violence tends to lead to more rather than less violence (essentially a corollary of the square-cube law), so “just get rid of the authority holding a notoriously fragmented and warlike region together” isn’t exactly a recipe for less conflict. If we instead imagine that the authority holding Western Europe together was secular (as much as anything can be secular in this period), then the number of warlike fragmented regions that didn’t expand violently after being politically unified throughout history is indistinguishable from zero. The analogues here would be the Italians (under Rome) or Mongols, not exactly the most peaceful peoples.
So to get back to your heuristic, the Church undeniable caused the Crusades, but it’d be a much harder sell to say that without the Crusades there wouldn’t be something else in its place.
Sure, there’s always more going into a conflict that just one thing, the question is how do you sort out which ones are important enough to be considered causal.
The European wars of religion?
On one hand, that’s a good point. On the other hand, even in such an extreme example you had nonsense like Catholic France fighting on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years’ War, so clearly they weren’t fighting for religion then. This means that even such a massive, explicitly religious conflict had a political dimension that could outweigh the religious dimension for some participants.
What does it mean to believe in the “same god” if god isn’t real?
It means they all believe in the same god.
Batman isn’t real either, and has had different interpretations over the years, but all Batman fans are fans of the same character regardless of which version of Batman they prefer.
Well, they all accept the book Old Testament as canon, they just disagree on which fan theory correctly continues that story.
Christians and Jewish people that pray in Arabic also pray to Allah. Western Christians really don’t like that.
Pfft, losers. Old Woman God is better than both of these!
Man!
And I’m 37!
Well I can’t just call you “man”
