Novemberromeo, the fact that you characterize yourself as an atheist doesn’t eliminate any “religious bias” on your part, if I may be so bold. The 20th century’s worst atrocities were committed by atheists: Stalin (nominally Orthodox, of course, but I’ll get to that), Hitler, Pol Pot, for instance.
We have to be careful to distinguish between religion as a spiritual philosophy and religion as an expression of culture and politics. They are not at all the same thing. Example: the well-known gutsy Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (author of “Inshallah” and “the Rage and the Pride” amongst others), is an outspoken anti-cleric, an atheist and a communist (I know that means something milder in Italy than it did in the USSR). But yet for all that she still considers herself Roman Catholic, and this is part of her argument in “the Rage and the Pride” for limiting immigration to Italy – Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands made a similar point. Why is she RC? Because, she writes, she was born within the sounds of the bells of [a small church in a village whose name I can’t remember], in rural Tuscany.
It’s like race. When you tell people that race is a sociological construct, many stare at you in disbelief. Naturally race is “biological” they would say – you inherit your race from your parents. But do you? Or do you inherit physical characteristics, a certain ‘scattergram’ of which is defined by society as being a particular race? In South Africa, not long before apartheid ended, either P.W. Botha or de Klerk, I can’t remember which, installed a kind of 4-chamber parliament, divided on racial grounds: Whites/Europeans, Blacks/Africans [am using double terms here because the Afrikaans terms tended to use colour, such as Swartjies [sp?] and Blankjis whereas English-speaking ZA-ers tended to use geographical terms], “Coloureds” (which did not simply mean mixed race – it has a precise, historical meaning), and “Asians,” by which was meant primarily Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, and so on.
What few Chinese there were were lumped in with whites. Imagine that: a Chinese and a white having the same race!
Funny you should use those examples. I’m going to reveal that I must be older than you but 
but India is ruled by a militant Hindu party right now, as it happens – the BHP. Mind you, they have to “open the tent” a bit to ensure national unity, but Hindu nationalists regularly attack trains full of Muslims and set them on fire, and a few years ago they destroyed the Muslim mosque at Ayodhya.
And, here’s where I reveal I’m probably older than you, but I remember when Buddhist monks would regularly self-immolate in public to protest either the right-wing dictatorship of South Vietnam, or the communists who took over after the fall of South Vietnam. Also, the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese, are Buddhists; some of their extremists see the Tamils as unwanted immigrants from India (Tamil Nadu). The Tamils are Hindus, and the Tamil Tigers are, I think, pretty well-known.
And here in Canada – finally – trials are underway to try the Sikh extremists who want to form a separate country called Khalistan, who blew up a 747 that was flying from Montreal to New Delhi, and tried to blow up another, trans-Pacific flight (in the latter the bomb failed to go off on time, but did detonate in the baggage handling area of Narita airport, killing several baggage handlers).
In the United States own history anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism runs deep, and at one point even the Mormons had a “massacre order” out from the state of Missouri (it gave them a day, maybe 2, to clear out of the state or they were open targets for anyone who wanted to kill them – it was discovered to be still on the books in I think about 1975 or 1976, and the then-governor of Missouri came to Utah and they had this big ceremony of destroying the old law).
Here in Canada, and I think this applies to the US, too, we tried in a deliberate and systematic way to destroy the autochthonous (“First Nations”) culture through boarding schools run by the Anglicans and RCatholics, primarily (although they were actually just subcontractors acting under the Dept. of Indian and Northern Affairs). In Quebec, as recently as the 1960s, Jehovah’s Witnesses were systematically discriminated against in provincial law.
I’ll give you one final example. As a prototypical Canadian, I see myself as a polite, non-violent, bridge-building citizen of a middle power which tries to explain Europe to the US and the US to Europe. To the USAmericans this is seen as preachy and condescending, and Europeans are baffled that we should see any difference between ourselves and USAmericans [note the terminology] at all.
In the Iraq war, for the first time since Vietnam, Canada did not officially back the U.S. (although indirectly we did, by relieving some US forces in Afghanistan and some naval units in the Gulf who were supporting them, so the US forces could be relocated to Iraq). The geopolitical reason is that Canada sees itself by nature a multilateralist country (like we have a choice! When’s the last time you heard anyone speak of “Canadian imperialism?”*) and while we agreed that Saddam was not Mr. Nice Guy, to invade a country unilaterally (okay, trilaterally, if you include GB and AUS) was not a “UN” thing to do, and Canada is very big on peace-keeping – our then foreign minister, Lester B. Pearson, won a Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the concept during the Suez Canal crisis in the 50s.
But when I talked to US friends who supported the war, they were aghast that I didn’t. “Can’t you see how evil this guy is?” “We’re just doing what has to be done” they’d say. In a famous Freudian slip, Pres. Bush early on referred to the need for a “crusade” (a meaning loaded with historical connotations, to be sure!) to “cleanse” Iraq. In other words, USAmericans who supported the war often expressed themselves in quasi-religious or moralistic tones to justify what many in the world saw as simple, naked aggression, implying that the big oil companies were behind it (something I think has a grain of truth, incidentally, but that’s another discussion).
By now we know much of the evidence for Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and other evils were if not outright fraudulent, at least “spun” politically for domestic consumption. It turns out that the heroic, dramatic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, who looks like someone you’d take to a high school graduation dance [called “proms” in the US], was “scripted” for maximum effect. The letter supposedly linking Iraq to Niger relating to the purchase of uranium was shown to be a very clumsy forgery. As one cartoon making the rounds of the WWW put it:
Pane 1: Tony Blair says “But how can you be sure that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?” Pane 2: George Bush: “Because we kept the receipts.”
This is an irreverent way of pointing out that from about 1985 until 1989, a company based in Maryland (now they are in Virginia) legally sold anthrax, botulinum, sarin and other such material, to Iraq, under the authority of export permits issued by the US Dept. of Commerce.
During the first Gulf War (Desert Storm), a public relations firm that specializes in working with governments, called Knowlton & Hill, planted a totally fabricated story about Iraqi soldiers throwing prematurely born babies in Kuwait City hospitals onto the floors so the soldiers could steal the incubators and take them back to Iraq.
The U.S. government manufactured the excuse for intervention in Vietnam, too – the Gulf of Tonkin incident – and it even appears that all the way back to the Spanish American War, the U.S. (or, oddly, a newspaper magnate named William Randolph Hearst) manufactured excuses to enter wars.
Why? The Soviets never needed an excuse I tell USAmericans that in a way this is a backhanded compliment to their basic good nature and sense of morality – they need to have a reason to go to war, one they can feel good about.
And when it boils down to it, that describes a lot of wars. Sometimes a religious label is attached to it: “the unity of Ireland” isn’t really about Catholics versus Protestants, it’s about England’s settlement of decommissioned Scottish soldiers and their families in Ulster during the 18th century (iirc). But the Scots happen to be Protestants, so the conflict has been presented as being a religious war, which is strictly speaking incorrect.
Well, enough examples – you get the point.
*actually, there is a tragi-comic exception. Back in the early 80s a group of businessmen in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British Caribbean crown colony, approached a Canadian Senator to see if Canada could annex the T&C. I thought this was great, and had a letter published in our largest national paper saying that this would mean Senators could go on vacation for half the year, but still spend their money in Canada. Needless to say, the T&C’s are still a colony, but of Britain.
Is it really about religion? Or is it just another territorial war politically sold into the minds of gullible people? :dubious: