"there wasn’t one second of peace in this world"
The blood stained human history makes a solid prediction for an ever lasting general warfare state in the future. This took me back to a lecture I’ve heard and luckily was able to trace back and rehear, it’s called God and War by professor Mark Juergensmeyer from the University of California taken at Princeton, here’s the
link. I strongly recommend you to take the time and watch it.
In generally he draws a very thin line between war and religion and in many cases bound them together. Not in the sense of a religion serving as grounds for wars or fueling them but in a sense of a common denominator between the two. Juergensmeyer explains how they function similarly; both provide alternative perceptions of reality, an alternative framework of order in a disordered society, provide meaning in a meaningless world and arrange it socially and existentially. Religion provides an alternative framework of order that reconcile life’s deep anomalies on a transcendent plane, especially in the sense of immortality since humans know from early age that they are mortal there is a great comfort in the idea of after life, reincarnation, reward and punishment and heaven and hell. So religion provides immortality, it gives meaning to death. It places the daily sufferings and anomalies in a greater context and that’s very comforting. And wars provide an alternative reality based on the moral absolutism of social conflict and that provides an important social comforting. Social tension creates a great opportune moment for wars to make sense, since they divide the world to black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, and humans’ Odd Appeal of War, as the professor calls it, add the emotional fuel.
Humans’ want to confront with disturbing reality scenes such as car accidents, terror attack, natural disasters and etc. the confrontation makes sense of the chaos. War too puts sense in a senseless situation. It is very freighting but there is something comforting in war. It creates a sense of control unity and meaningfulness. It arranges the world. It arranges the social anomaly. It is not rational but at least you know who you are (sometimes by defining what you are against) and what you are doing. There is a war there is a meaning.
The human need and even dependency on religion or at least god is nothing new but the connection to war in the philosophical plane was new to me. Wars need religion. It clarifies the nature of the struggle. Provides a moral justification to the killing. Demonize the enemy. It makes sense in bombing attack. Both are visions of humans’ consciousness, patterns of understanding reality and that’s why they will always be part of reality. And that’s a hell of a scary thought.
