I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering.
It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.
Tehran isn’t calculating missile ranges based on sutras. Washington doesn’t position carrier groups because of metaphysics. Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat.
Spiritual narratives make clean moral theater for the public. They mobilize bodies. They sanctify retaliation. But the machinery underneath runs on leverage and deterrence, not theology.
Wake up to the real world.
Calling it primarily religious violence feels tidy and tragic in a philosophical way. It’s harder, and more uncomfortable, to admit that it’s strategic violence dressed in symbols people recognize.
Shunyata is a beautiful lens for seeing through ego. It doesn’t dissolve geopolitics.
"Security doctrine" is quite a euphemism for aggressive territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing, which is tightly wrapped in religious rhetoric.
But religion, and not pure materialism, is absolutely at the center of the motivation of these people, the leaders and the population alike. It's not just, as you say, a sham that the leaders use to control and mobilise the masses. Religious fanaticism is at the source of the actions and the very existence of the Islamic Republic. Just as religious fanaticism is at the heart of the worst excesses of Zionism and the at-worst-genocidal, at-best-apartheid policies of Israel. It's not just materialism! It's not just prosaic greed! These people are moved by a holy fervour.
Like, this is the central mistake of Marxism, for all its merits in analysing the "capitalist mode of production", it is absolutely false that material conditions and class struggle are the engine of history.
Yeah. Because people believe in in and leaders take advantage. DUH. Its not so peaceful religion all the way.
Sure, but it's even simpler.. The Ayatollah Regime funds regional terrorism. It destabilizes the region, gets people killed, and holds back progress.
Also, they are always seemingly always almost done building a nuke.. Which frankly nobody wants(not even them because they know they'd be obliterated the instant the world thought they actually had one or were about to for-reals have one).
They are BAD FOR BUSINESS both private AND PUBLIC.
As long as the rest of the region was developing eventually their number would be up. The recent uprising and massacre was the signal their number is up. Time to go, honestly signed all their neighbors.
Chimps generally agree war is bad and horrific. But some smart, opportunistic and hard-working chimps can create situations that make war possible. Even though the war will only bring losses to most chimps on both sides.
Can you provide an example of this in 2026?
It seems a little tenable with the ayatollah and Iran. But even here you don’t hear much talk of this being a war in the name of religion anymore. Nowhere near a few years ago and certainly nothing like 9/11 and the Taliban.
And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way. Just a war defending people against attackers at the gates.
The American ambassador to Israel recently publicly said that Israel has a "biblical right" to the whole of the middle-east! (Watch these two interviews to understand how cleverly, and strongly, Israeli politics is tied up with American evangelical Christianity to keep American polity tied to Israel's existence - https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-fares-abraham-021826 and https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-mike-huckabee-022026 . Both these interviews give you a very insightful picture of how religious fundamentalist Israelis in power are total nutcases, supported by the American Christian fundamentalist fruitcakes).
If you're a religious Jew, then you believe you have a mandate from God (so an irrefutable right, or even obligation, needing no justification) to settle and rule not only the West Bank but the entire region. So there will always be that motivation, as long as religious Judaism exists in Israel.
And in any case, the "most religious" (ie those whose politics are most totally driven by Judaism) bloc in Israel are at best ambivalent about the Israeli state and the settlement enterprise, and actively hostile to military service.
Israeli hostility to Iran is driven by a "defensive" paranoia, not a religious mission.
Also God didn't say when. But he did promise, according to the Book.
Well not really , most Orthodox definitely don't believe this in fact some of them are anti Zionist and the ones who accept Israel's existence definitely do not think Israel needs to expand its borders like that. So no to that.
The Haredim (the ultra-Orthodox) are more complicated, and in general don't want all the promised land (they believe that the state established militarily/politically isn't the "spiritual" state that was promised). But, when it comes to the currently occupied land, they have been shifting right in recent years. They vote in coalition with the nationalist right, and their communities increasingly overlap geographically with settlements.
Only certain Hasidic groups oppose Israel, including Satmar Hasidim (over 100k followers), and Neturei Karta (fringe, only about 1k supporters). That's less than millions, and a minority within the Hasidic world.
Theologically, they oppose it based on an interpretation a Talmudic passage saying that establishment of Israel has to happen after the coming of the Messiah.
Additionally, there are a lot different denominations of Jews within Israel, some of whom have more pragmatic views. But a significant, politically influential minority believes in their duty to govern all biblical land.
Consider that we haven't had a Sanhedrin (supreme Jewish council) for a while, which makes a bunch of Jewish law unenforceable. While there's some fringe interest in reinstituting the classical system, there's no scripture that would clearly obligate Jews to do so. Most just accept that times have changed.
Similarly while there's some fringe interest in recapturing all historic Jewish lands, there's no scripture that would clearly obligate Jews to do so. Most just accept that times have changed.
You can find a few weird individuals anywhere if you look hard enough, but portraying "religious Jews" broadly as aspiring to conquer the whole Middle East is way off base.
I would say this is generally false.
There are many religious Jews who believe there should be no state of Israel until the Messiah comes. Judaism is very open to interpretations and certainly within the question of modern state politics doesn't have as much to say as you seem to think it does.
There are many different Rabbis in Israel with different political opinions and generally their followers will tend to hold similar beliefs. There are right wing Rabbis and left wing Rabbis, it's not uniform at all. During the Oslo peace process there were many religious people supporting and many opposing, pretty much the same as secular.
What is true is that some Israelis view their right to the land in the context of the biblical promise God made our people. That is not the same thing. Funny enough I'd say more Christians believe the literal promise and it's implication on current day politics than Jews. It's also true that religious people these days tend to be more right leaning politically. But the religion isn't mandating those world views it just that they can align.
Will you grant me this: religious motivations for violence exist within Israel, including the ruling political class?
Project 2025, a christian nationalist policy advisement widely followed by the current regime, prescribes supporting isreal
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...
Huckabee one week ago:
"Citing the book of Genesis, Carlson asked whether the modern state of Israel had a right to the lands promised in the Bible by God to Abraham, stretching from the Euphrates River to the Nile, covering much of the Middle East. In response, Huckabee said: “It would be fine if they took it all. But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/21/mike-huckabee-claims-israel-...
Imagine, for example, you wanted to write the religion of Liberalism, so you collect the works of all the major thinkers on the subject of liberalism into one book. Now imagine someone gets the bad idea that all these authors must actually have a unified view on what liberalism is, means, and implies. You'll end up seeing that person teach a form of liberalism that's easily countered with other passages from their book and they'll mostly just wave it away because they have their passages and the others are simply you misinterpreting an "obvious" metaphor.
That is christianity in a nutshell, just replace liberalism with god. That's why there are so many sects. Because it's just too easy to yell "Context context context!" when a difficult passage comes up you don't agree with and use "spiritual" as the excuse for why you don't actually have to follow that passage.
1. Many Israeli Jewish Zionists are either "traditional" (religious but not that much) or Religious Zionist, and they are generally part of the right wing coalition. Actual atheists tend to be in the Israeli (still-Zionist) left.
2. The Zionist conception of Jewish identity is not "racial" in the American sense. The most obvious sense in which this is true is that it considers converts and their descendants full members of the nation. Probably the closest analogies are some Native American nations' identities or Armenian nationalism.
But you're directionally correct - Zionism is not a particularly religious ideology within the Jewish world, and outside of the Religious Zionist minority the political class is (openly!) on the less observant end even on the right.
"Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."
The fallacy of reification is treating something emergent as a thing-unto-itself rather than a process or interaction born from constituents at a lower stratum. A reified thing can be recognized and changed for this reason. A mental concept needs only a change of mind to mutate, or to be destroyed.
Religion may well prove to be a reification that is destroyed once it is recognized as such. But I do believe that you cannot reduce that which is real and not real to only those things that have physical antecedents at lower strata, as we see emergent phenomena in the physical world as well.
Shunyata means everything is empty. Empty of what? Empty of inherent, independent existence. That means everything is connected -- not only connected, but mostly illusory, sitting on top of a reality that cannot be understood in terms of objects, processes, distinctions, or boundaries between objects. Sometimes, this connection takes on strange forms.
For example: The horrible reality of war was a direct cause for your compassionate unease. I.e. war acted as a cause for compassion. This is strange. How do we reconcile this disturbing relationship, where a compassionate response is directly the child of war? In other words, horrific war has given rise to compassion, and this is a causal relationship, in the same way that a child arises from a mother. So, violence and love can arise from each other? What? Are they not supposed to be opposites?
The next step is a bit more provocative. Shunyata seems to imply that, since everything lacks inherent and independence existence, then suffering is not a part of the human condition. Instead, it is a mental construct. It isn't that the suffering of humanity does not exist; it's that it is constructed by the mind.
Deleuze and Guattari offers an interesting viewpoint on this. There are various intensities that do arise naturally. Injury, for example, is an intensity. But, suffering itself is not "really-real" unless we reify the intensities as suffering. And eliminating suffering partially involves the non-reification of intensities into suffering.
Obviously, easier said than done.
Anyway I'll leave it there. It's probably quite easy to destroy my points here, so I would appreciate it if people steelmanned my comment instead of strawmanning it. Shunyata is a genuinely useful discussion from a mental health and human flourishing standpoint. And has some very interesting and rigorous logic behind it. (see Mulamadhyamakakarika by Nagarjuna)
(Wrong) Knife fight: a fight between people about knives
(Right) Knife fight: a fight between people using knives
There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).
Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
And the fact you feel a hole that religion fills for you doesn’t mean it’s there in everyone. Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples).
To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't.
> Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.
While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill).
While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc.
No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them.
To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way".
What a time to be alive, again! And please, downvote me, comment that US is fighting for some country’s civilians freedom. It’s fun too.
No one lives up to their ideals on a day-to-day basis:
This just isn't true. Religion is never the reason for these conflicts. It's the excuse. It's how that conflict is sold to the rest of the world. It's how civilians are manipulated into dying in a conflict.
The source of these conflicts is always material. Always.
Reagan's Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig once said [1]:
> Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.
In 1986, then Senator and future president Joe Biden said [2]:
> [Israel] is the best $3 billion ivnestment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to an invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.
Much of US Middle East polciy was aimed to sabotaging and undermining Pan-Arab Nationalism (particularly under then Egyptian President Nasser) [3].
Nothing about any of this has anything to do with faith. In this case it's about oil.
Whatever crimes you think Iran might've done, I'll stack up the US crimes against Iran and it won't even be close, including:
1. Iran was a liberal democracy that the US deposed in 1953 at the behest of the British because BP didn't want to have to pay higher royalties, ultimately leading Mossadegh wanting to "nationalize" their own oil;
2. In 1978, then US-puppet Saddam Hussein expelled Khomenei from Iraq. This was about the time the US realized that Iran was likely lost. it is believed that the reason for this was that a fundamentalist regime was preferred to a Communist one (which was otherwise the likely outcome) as the US didn't want Iran to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. So all this pearl-clutching about the current regime rings hollow when you realize the US helped created it;
3. As punishment for the Revolution, the US supplied weapons to Iraq and fueled the Iran-Iraq war for almost a decade that killed over a million people; and
4. Crippling economic sanctions, which is a fancy way of saying "starving people and denying them medical care", for daring not to be a US puppet.
If you point me to any conflict you think is based on faith, I'll show you the material interests behind it.
[2]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b...
[3]: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12...
Since the beginning of the Green Revolution¹, no. The source of these conflicts are always ideological. Always. Ideology may come through religion or some other medium.
Countries don't go occupying land because they need crops or slaves anymore. Material is always cheaper to buy than to get from an occupation. The desire to annex some land is always for somebody's pet project, it doesn't make economic sense.
1 - In a very wide sense. Agriculture stopped being the bottleneck for human populations at some point in the 18th or early 19th centuries.
Airstrip one is disappointed.
