My Big Invisible Friend Can Beat Up Your Big Invisible Friend!

I never really understood Religious wars, particularly the Religious wars among Christians, Muslims and Jews, as they all claim to worship the same God.  But even less comprehensible to me were the internecine wars between various Christian factions, particularly because the one they worship was called the Prince of Peace.

But, when you boil down Religious wars, it comes down to the title of this entry: My Big Invisible Friend Can Beat Up Your Big Invisible Friend.  I thought this was silly because if God exists and is largely as described by most Religions, then here is this All-Powerful, All-Knowing,  Omnipresent deity directing His frail, short-sighted and very finite human beings to engage in mortal combat with those of an enemy who doesn’t exist. 

Why bother?  Surely God had better things to do with His infinite time than to send out those who sing His praises to commit acts that He says not to do (foremost among them, thou shalt not kill).

But, then, it became clear to me that Religion had very little to do with the teachings of the underlying myths, and then it became easy to understand: Religious war, like all wars, was waged for the betterment of those directing the winning side. 

This leads to the following simple truth: the rich and powerful like being rich and powerful, and seek ever to increase their riches and their power.

Let me throw another simple truth out there: money does not exist in nature.  Power, sure.  Money, not so much.  Money is a man-made device to allow for the uneven distribution of finite materials.  And money is based on land.  The more your land can produce, the more wealth it generates.  Better farmlands, more plentiful forests, huge running rivers, all generate revenue.  And war is fought to increase land holdings.  The word “miles” comes from the Latin word for “soldiers”. 

This, however, only partially expains the animosity bred into people of one faith to despise people of another.  The reason that animosity is fostered between peoples of faith is the same reason that certain political parties today wish to foster hatred between its own citizens.  To increase the uneven distribution of finite materials.

In Man’s natural state, there is no large disparity in wealth.  The tribe succeeds together, or fails together.  Sure, in the end of a long cold winter, it is the strong who survive and the weak who perish, but food and water are, more or less, evenly distributed, and everyone has a role in bringing in food: the able-bodied hunt; the infirmed, elderly, young, pregnant and those who watch after the children gather fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries.  Most meals were vegetarian, and meat had to be eaten quickly.  This led to the women farming and the men hunting (note, there will be more on this as I investigate the story of Cain and Abel in an entry to come).  As time went on, farming produced enough extra food that certain people could dedicate some of their time to non-food producing efforts, and, eventually, a class of people who didn’t produce food at all came into being;l this included both the Priest class and the Ruling class. 

During times of scarcity, one could understand that the food producing people would want to keep their food and the non-food producing people, well, they could fend for themselves.  It was about then that the Priest class claimed control over the weather, thus making themselves an invaluable part of the food production, and holding out the threat that, if they were not well tended to, perhaps the Gods would send a bitter cold winter, or withhold the rain next planting season.  Of course, if the Priest couldn’t deliver, that would be the end of that Priest and he would be sacrificed to appease the Gods whom he must have offended.  It didn’t take too long for the Priests to come up with the clever idea of sacrificing animals instead, by simple decree, and suggested that people bring their best animals and crops to be sacrificed to the Gods.  This, by the way, was the backdrop to Samuel I and II, which started the line of Hebrew Kings.  Anyway, if the Gods weren’t appeased, there must have been a problem with the sacrifice, and therefore, it was the peasants’ fault, and not the Priests’.  Pretty clever, huh?

It became clear, way back then, that there were always going to be more of the peasants than there were of the privileged classes, both the Priest class and the Ruling class, who, by the way, liked being rich and powerful, and wanted to increase their riches and their power.  But, as I said, there were more of the poor and the powerless than there were of the rich and the powerful, and if they ever bonded together, they could do away with the rich and the powerful by sheer force of numbers. 

 Remember that line: we must stand together or we shall fall divided?  Or we’re only as strong as the weakest link?  Well, the Ruling/Priest classes sure did, and they made sure that the poor were always fighting among themselves, and they kept the education within the Ruling/Priest class.  And both passed laws to keep the poor from taking by force what the privileged had made for themselves by cunning.

Both the poor and the rich, regardless of color or Religion or language or whatnot, will always have more in common with their counterpart on the other side than they do with each other, and the larger the disparity in wealth between the rich and poor, the stronger the link with their counterparts.  So, in times of extreme disparity in fortunes, a war, even if it is not profitable, serves to lessen the number of the poor surrounding the rich, making the rich safer. 

Also, the greater the disparity in fortunes, the less money is spent on the common good, and what is spent is on the less common and is less good.  One example of this in our modern world is the idea of spending public money on school vouchers, schools for the privileged, parochial schools, or some combination thereof… take the money out of the public realm and put it into the private… take the money out of the secular and put it into the religious.  Mission Accomplished!

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