Why People Kill Each Other

From the March 28 Diane Rehm show on WAMU (second hour).

Caller: I am actually have Sunni and half Shi'ite. And I think that the recent events in Basra are a great example of how this Western narrative of Sunnis and Shi'ites fighting for ages is wrong. What happened in Iraq is a political and economic war between Sunnis and Shi'ites who are nationalists against other Sunnis and Shi'ites who are separatists and want to secede. I wish we can hear more from the Iraqi narrative instead of repeating over and over one narrative.

...

Panelist: People always fight for economic purposes, for political power but they always couch it with religious or ideological garb. This is what is happening in Iraq.

This captures a major thought I have long failed to spit out in a succinct manner. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are demagogues, not Christians. If they found a way to harness atheists with slick-talk and gain even more power, you can believe they would do it in a second.

When I was in the Middle East, whether in Israel, Palestine, or other areas, I never got the sense of a true religious dimension to the conflict aside from the obvious ways their leaders used that shared identity to motivate action. What the religion teaches is of secondary importance, what is important is that people have a shared identity. Once the shared identity is cemented, no one asks questions because to do so would threaten their identity.

The war in Iraq is not between Sunnis and Shi'as - or even between the U.S. and terrorists or the U.S. and Iraqis. The war is between competing groups of people who harness a Sunni or Shi'a identity to achieve some gain. If they were all Sunni's, they would still be fighting but using some other distinct piece of a shared identity to motivate action.

This is why I find so much of religion and who believes in God to be non-interesting. Because if there was no such thing as religion, we would still have people like Pat Robertson occupying the same position and push small-minded agendas to divide us based on inconsequential details like who we like to sleep with. Religion is not the problem nearly as much as a human tendency to seek out like-minded people to create a shared identity.

Once the shared identity is created, some folks inevitably find ways of profiting from exploiting it. Those who think differently are ostracized.