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This whole Israel-Palestine issue has made it even more clear than ever that politicians and many of the "elites" have literally no critical thinking skills or the ability to reason out one or two steps into the future. First there is the "Cease Fire People". It's understandable that people are upset seeing what is going on in Gaza with women and children, but what do they think a cease fire will accomplish? It is literally just kicking the can down the road again. Do they think Hamas will be more reasonable and someone people can negotiate with? If not, you are literally just allowing them to regroup and commit another terrorist attack that could destabilize the Middle East again in a few years. It's really that simple. If you want peace in the region, Hamas cannot be allowed to be in charge in Gaza. And if you asked the Egyptian government, they'd probably tell you the same thing since they just had their own issues wit the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then you have the people who think there will be peace if the Palestinians get their own state. Throwing out for a minute whether or not the Palestinians will attack Israel, the real question is how quickly they will start attacking each other an a civil war. We already know there was a Fatah–Hamas conflict recently, and why would they not fight each other again in a civil war that could very possibly be even worse than what's going on in Gaza? Looking at the neighboring countries, it's not exactly a place known for political stability.
I understand people seeing things on television that makes them sad and they just want it to stop. That's understandable. But has anyone in the State Department revolting against the Biden Administration for their stance on Israel given any reasonable plan for what comes next after a cease fire with Hamas? And I say this as someone who is not a Zionist or a huge fan of Israel.
Westerners just don't seem to be able to understand Muslim extremists. Hamas fighters are literally Islamists that can't be reasoned with. This should be obvious by now to everyone on planet earth after Al Qaeda and ISIS, but apparently some people still haven't learned this obvious fact. I don't know if it's because Westerners don't think that people could actually sincerely believe in their religion like that so they must be ACTUALLY motivated by something else (wrong, as their writings tell us), or their belief that inside everyone is a Westerner waiting to come out who supports gay marriage and diversity, a combination of this, or something else entirely. But if these people think that a cease fire with Hamas will lead to a long standing peace then they are delusional.
I think it’s a combination of a lot of things.
Most Westerners live in extremely safe societies where war is something they see on the news. Americans are safer than even Europeans, having never had a war on their own soil since the end of the American Civil War in 1865. We’ve had a few attacks on our own soil: Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. This makes understanding the need to fight the war a bit more difficult. To a Westerner, war is optional even when you are being attacked. I think much the same of crime — for most people, living in suburbs and gated communities, crime isn’t a reality to them. It feels bad to lock up a thief who stole from a store. But, living in a high crime area full of drugs and gangs where everywhere makes it harder to live a normal life, and makes it far more likely that you yourself will be mugged or assaulted.
Second, most westerners haven’t taken their religion seriously since at least the end of WW2. Looking at the supposed rise of Christian Nationalism, what the term seems to mean is Christians who actually believe in Christianity and live by it. They don’t like drag queens or transsexuals because they understand the Bible to say those things are wrong. They want the traditional family structure as they believe the Bible commands this. The elite see this as weird, but it’s actually the default state of humanity. Most people throughout history have made moral decisions based on their religion, and most humans do today. But if you understand religion to be “go to church, temple, synagogue, or mosque once a week and ignore it the rest of the time”, you have no way to understand people who orient themselves by scriptures. They literally have no lived experience with people who think like a religious person, so they don’t understand that Hamas means what they say, that Allah commands them to war and dying as a martyr.
Third, the university teaches that all of history runs on economics. Poverty causes crime and war and terrorism. The only solutions are thus economic and redistribution or wealth. So they’re learning only one toolset. If you just made Hamas rich enough, they’ll stop. The fact that Gaza is awash in aide and the leadership make the list of rich, and are still launching attacks should show that they don’t care about the money. But the West seems unable to look for other reasons for the attack. So the problem cannot be anything other than Israel hoarding the wealth and the land and refusing to share.
I suppose Alaska doesn't count as "American soil" then?
To be fair, Alaska was still a territory at the time, rather than a full-fledged state.
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First: yes, the Western insulation from war and violence is doing a lot of the work on this issue. Our decisions over here won’t ever lead to a rocket hitting our neighborhood. As long as supporting/condemning Palestine is basically cost-free, we’re going to get people playing tribal politics rather than carefully trying to construct a solution. No surprise.
Second: no way. Calls for a ceasefire are the fruit of a deeply Christian national character. They are the extreme form of turning the other cheek. This holds true even when the perpetrators are unrepentant, because Christian thought just views punishment differently. “Eye for an eye” is Old Testament, after all.
(I also disagree with your characterization of Christian fundamentalism, but that’s beside the point.)
Telling the Israelis not to fight back is deontological. There are good things and bad things, and bombing Palestine is presumed to be a bad thing. All the rest of this discourse—the naïveté, the tone-deafness, the lack of an alternate plan—stems from this one assumption.
It kind of seems like when you say "eye for an eye" you mean "makes the whole world blind", i.e. forgiveness instead of retribution. Just to be clear, the Old Testament is in favor of eye for an eye.
Leviticus 24, 19-20.
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I would disagree quite strenuously with this, the default state of humanity is a hunter-gatherer with no concept of what we would understand as "religion". I would even go further and say that conflating religion with morality is a relatively "modern" development. In most pagan religions the relationship individuals and groups have with the gods is a very practical and transactional affair, you give offerings to gods in an attempt to gain their support and help, morality does not really enter into it. To a pagan gods are basically just very powerful people and a fact of life that you have to deal with. In fact, I would say that you can also see traces of this thinking in christianity, particularly in the old testament before god had a kid and mellowed out a bit. You really get the impression that the hebrew god is worshipped because he is unfathomably powerful and terrifying rather than because he is some font of morality.
That's very explicit in the Old Testament especially the early parts. They make explicit covenants with that are about earthly rewards like having lots of descendants or being given possession of the promised land. There isn't anything about an afterlife better than that of a shade in Sheol.
God's punishments for breaking the covenant are earthly ones that usually involve bringing a foreign army against them. These stories of God's punishment mostly seem like post-hoc justifications for why Judah was defeated in battle and conquered despite having the support of the Lord of Hosts. They rationalize it as them having broken the covenant first.
This idea of God and the universe having a moral bent is something inserted later into Judaism through Zoroastrianism and Greek philosophy.
Sure, but what kind of things do they agree to do in those covenants?
The entirety of the Mosaic law found in the Torah? Are you trying to make some kind of point with this question or do you somehow not know that?
And you see no connection whatsoever between the Mosaic law and any sense of morality?
No, I don't think a law against eating pork has any bearing on morality.
I get what you mean now and I reject the implications.
Moses, like all great thinkers, was both original and true. In that, what he said that was true wasn't original and what he said that was original wasn't true.
I prefer Zoroaster. I think laws against kicking pregnant dogs make much more sense morally, than laws against eating shrimp.
That you disagree with the moral vision presented does not imply that the whole thing, at its time, in the perspective of the people involved, had nothing to do with morality.
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It is easy to explain.
Leave current world where food comes from well stocked supermarket refrigerators open 24/7/365.
Leave even world of your peasant ancestors living, I presume, in lands with temperate wet climates where pigs roamed in the forests and fed themselves for most of the year and had to be fed only during winter.
Enter dry and treeless world of Near East. In this world, pigs had to be fed for all year, with food that could otherwise feed people. In this world, pigs were not necessity, but luxury for the rich. People who try to explain pig ban in desert religions as health measure are wrong, it is explicit populist, pro-social measure.
You are certainly aware that the Bible is one of the most extremist and revolutionary books ever written, book that rejects all structures of oppression in its time and place, book whose vision of better world is world of anarcho-syndicalist peasant communes without (or with strictly limited) monarchy, without feudalism, without landlordism, without usury and loan sharking, without standing army and permanent slavery(OFC excepting Gentiles). See biblical commandments that do not make sense to you in this light, and they will fit.
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See also acoup on oaths:
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Even without formal religion, I just can't believe that early humans didn't have moral frameworks, just from the simple fact that moral systems facilitate group cohesion and survival. There's just no way hunter-gatherers were a bunch of homo economicuses, and only modern humans have morality. Morality isn't a byproduct of civilization; it's one of its foundational building blocks.
I think the objection was to saying most moral decisions were “based on their religion”, not that moral decision making didn’t happen at all.
The OP’s conclusion relies on religion as moral fabric rather than religion as a transaction. I believe the latter was much more common, historically, until the Middle Ages or maybe even the Enlightenment. Even though people were always making decisions (and judging others) based on morality.
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