> I've been thinking (my brain hurts because of it)- after a recent conversation in Rinkchat I have concluded that nearly every single war has something to do with politics and/or religion - mainly both at the same time.
>
> World War II, for example, was started off because Hitler (if you don't know who he is you must have really flunked History at school) wanted to kill all the Jews. The only way that could happen was if he became the premier of Germany, and Hey Presto, look what he did.
>
> The current troubles in Sri Lanka, Israel and Afghanistan are along the same principle. The moral of this story is... Politics and Religion don't mix.
>
> We have to get rid of one (I have a good feeling which one as well - bye bye politics) if we want to survive the next millenium.
>
> Chr"Atheist and free-spirit"ico

I wasn't a poli-sci major, but I think of politics as being, at bottom, merely the practice of making a social contract "work" despite the differences between members of the society. Religious belief/praxis is among the biggest of such differences, so if persons of different faiths are to co-exist in the same society, it seems natural that in the course of working out politics, they're going to have to grapple with religion.

I think that this extends to inter-societal relations. There's a sort of social contract between entire nations in peacetime, too, and the working-out of religious differences on that scale is probably similar to the way it happens in smaller groups on the individual scale. What I'm saying is that as long as you're practicing politics *at all*, on any scale, I think you're necessarily going to have to be involved with religion, too. It's not as though you can have religion-free politics, unless everyone agrees on religious matters.

But maybe you're not speaking so much in the abstract, and are only saying that it's not a good thing when a particular religious view gains representation in the highest political office of a society. I guess that's fair enough. At least, I don't have the time now to really think over it and decide whether I agree or disagree more.

What I *do* think is that drawing big, distinct boxes labeled "Politics" and "Religion" and sorting the problems of feuding Mid-East nations into one box or the other is a pretty inadequate approach. A nation like Palestine has grievances with Israel on all kinds of levels, and the relationship has been fed by cultural events, armed conflicts, religious differences, the policies of various political administrations, commerce, and all sorts of other stuff. Looking at a titanic tangle of issues like that, it seems not really very relevant or helpful to invoke the cliche "politics and religion don't mix". I don't know, maybe it's just me. At any rate, I don't see either Politics or Religion going away anytime soon, and I definitely wouldn't look forward to the death of either.

Iss "you'd think by now I'd know better than to get into these threads" achar