2006: a good year for religious conflict and atheists

[everythingsxen]

As you enjoy your non-denominational pageants, trim your holiday trees and yell season’s greetings at each other, the defiantly secular among you could be forgiven for feeling a little smug about celebrating Winterval after all that has happened in 2006. As years go it has hardly been a great commercial for the idea that religion is balm for the soul. Depressingly it has rather reinforced the impression, developed over the centuries, that religious belief only deepens and strengthens Man’s propensity for hatred and self-destruction.

All year in Iraq, Sunni and Shia Muslims have been busy replaying the message that Christians have so effectively articulated through the ages — that intrareligious intolerance can be more bloody and murderous even than that between the followers of the great Abrahamic faiths. Rising Shia power across the Middle East, led by a resurgent Tehran, is causing friction and alarm among Sunni-dominant regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere. A millennium-old dispute about caliphs and imams can resonate as violently as the theological disputations about the validity of Martin Luther’s religious critiques 500 years ago.

Not that the traditional interfaith hatreds have been quiet this year. On the contrary. In Israel, Lebanon and Gaza, a political conflict that has religious differences at its core raged for much of the year. Within Lebanon, yet another civil war edged threateningly closer between a bewildering array of sects and ethnic groups that all seem to have religious affiliation as their defining point of difference.

Across Africa, religious-ethnic warfare consumes swaths of the continent. The outrage of Darfur, with its roots in a Sudanese war between Muslims and Christians, continues to mock the conscience of the world. Only this week, the embers of religious conflict in Somalia have burst into flames as extremist Muslim militias try to drive out the moderate Government. Across the border predominantly Christian Ethiopia appeared to be girding itself for outright war against its Muslim neighbour.

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[Kiouni]

1. can't we all get along?

My wife recently had christmas pictures taken of us to send out to our friends and family. The catch is that I'm not a christian but a Buddhist and prefer happy holidays to be said to me. But we did send out christmas cards to our christian friends and family and a happy holidays card to the others and we sent just an empty envelope to our atheist and unitarian friends (that's a joke). Is it hypocritical of me to do this? no, I think it just personalizes the thought behind the card a little more.