[Arun2009]

I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.

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.

[rambojohnson]

You’re mistaking the packaging for the product. Religion is the language leaders use. Power, territory, oil corridors, regional dominance, and domestic political survival are what they’re actually fighting over.

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.

[pphysch]

> Israel’s security doctrine isn’t a meditation retreat.

"Security doctrine" is quite a euphemism for aggressive territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing, which is tightly wrapped in religious rhetoric.

[asdfe3r343]

> Religion is the language leaders use.

Yeah. Because people believe in in and leaders take advantage. DUH. Its not so peaceful religion all the way.

[frogperson]

That was very well said. Thank you.

[Rapzid]

IMHO you're still making it too complicated; knives out GOT, titans of industry..

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.

[andrepd]

On the contrary, you're mistaking the means with the ends. Yes the regimes and their leaders think about oil corridors and regional proxies. Yes probably a chunk of the apparatchiks don't believe in the spiel and just care about enriching themselves off of corruption and so forth.

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.

[ozgrakkurt]

It makes a lot more sense if you picture a bunch of organized, strong and merciless chimps attacking some other chimps to plunder what they have.

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.

[lioeters]

The best political insight in this thread. This is the planet of the apes. If any future historians are reading, some of us primates were aware of the absurdity of the situation, horrified by the senseless violence that erupts again and again, led by sociopathic chimps that somehow managed to organize whole societies against each other and profit from the whole primitive enterprise. What a waste of human potential.

[AbstractH24]

> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.

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.

[thisislife2]

> And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way.

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).

[kubb]

The land promised to the Israelites generally extends from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq/Syria, encompassing modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria and Saudi Arabia.

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.

[samrus]

The evangelicals support isreal due to religious obligation.

Project 2025, a christian nationalist policy advisement widely followed by the current regime, prescribes supporting isreal

[nonethewiser]

I have a very hard time understanding how the US is attacking Iran because of Christianity. I cannot even anticipate the hypothesis.

[js2]

America's Evangelical Christian Right:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/29/us/iran-israel-evangelicals-p...

https://archive.ph/Pz81T

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-...

[violentapricot]

It's not said in polite company, but Israeli concerns are racial, not religious. If you meet a Jewish zionist, then you've also met an athiest. An explanation of Christian Zionism deserves much longer discussion than can be made here, but how and why such an obvious contradiction to Jesus' ministry gained popularity is something worth studying.

[cogman10]

Once you realize the gospels and the epistles disagree, it becomes a lot easier to understand. Christianity is the practice of cognitive dissonance. The bible, due to the nature, has a lot of mixed messaging.

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.

[azernik]

Not entirely accurate:

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.

[monarchwadia]

It is rare to find a comment on shunyata on HN. I wanted to deepen the discussion on that, instead of move into geopolitics or the justification of status quo reality. I think youre very correct that war is unnecessary, if only we realize the illusory nature of many of the things we desire or hate.

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)

[HerbManic]

When it comes to battles of religion, Alan watts said it best.

"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."

[jackcosgrove]

Complexity can lead to "more is different" outcomes at higher strata. I would not say reified concepts are "made up" as they can have very real effects on both higher and lower strata.

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.

[vcryan]

It had nothing to do with religion, that element is used to distract.

[merelythere]

They are following their books like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[philistine]

Religion poisons everything.

[lukifer]

Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.

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.)

[cies]

Religious concerns are, IMHO, always a facade for the underlying economic/territorial/geopolitical reasons. These religious facades help sell the war effort: get young men to enlist and fight to the death for "preserving their identity". And "muh freedom" is just as much a religious motivation to me (unsubstantiated, indoctrinated, unthreatened).

[eleventyseven]

Religion isn't the facade, it is the medium through which other reasons are transmitted

[mkoubaa]

Fallacy.

(Wrong) Knife fight: a fight between people about knives

(Right) Knife fight: a fight between people using knives

[misiek08]

There is also point of view that remembers that always right behind US military there is a team building next oil pipeline. US tried to used China as cheap labor, lost a lot of intelligence and now - look at how much oil Iran has and who is it exporting to and what is the percentage at the destination. The numbers add up and only the funny (?) thing is - China is (going to) be most eco country, because they already use nuclear power a lot and were forced to work on that.

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.

[throw0101c]

> Buddhism

No one lives up to their ideals on a day-to-day basis:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

[gib444]

It makes you wonder about religion's true purpose. It's a really convenient framework for creating peoples/regions that hate each other, isn't it, as history has shown for millenia

[jmyeet]

> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.

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.

[1]: https://archive.ph/tMTBd

[2]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b...

[3]: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12...

[marcosdumay]

> The source of these conflicts is always material. Always.

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.

[GorbachevyChase]

I think the praise of the strategic value to US military interests are rationalizations and poor ones at that. The Gulf monarchies are allies in a meaningful sense and provide useful material support to the United States. Our “ally“ on the other hand was recently caught running a child prostitution ring and money laundering operation to control business and political leaders in the United States. Kidnapping children and removing their teeth so they can’t bite their rapists for political leverage is going to be remembered by future generations with the same horror and disgust as medieval torture and 20th century concentration camps.

[gpderetta]

> Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk,

Airstrip one is disappointed.

[azernik]

Hey there I'm Israeli and I'm quite politically informed and moderately religiously educated and I have never heard of this "curse of the eighth decade" thing you've heard of.

[samrus]

Isreal did have some polarization among liberal-conservative sides recently. Protests and all that. Could be