154: All War is Holy War, All War is Religious

REDACTED Culture Cast

The argument is made, time and time again, that if we could just get rid of religion, we would be able to end all wars. Yet that belief requires a willing ignorance to what religion is and how, at the core of each and every philosophy, is a fundamentally religious idea.
The idea that we could eliminate war from taking place wherever there are men reveals more about the person who believes it, than about the world as it is. Clausewitz described War as politics by another means, or at least poor translations of "On War" suggest that. Mao and Lenin viewed war as a part of Culture, or at least the way they waged their campaigns certainly implied so. And then there's the question of economics, that if we could solve the problem of scarcity in the world, we would end all reason for men to go to war with one another.
Each of these theories portrays different metaphysical ideas, different worldviews. And how we think of them in relation to war affects how we believe we ought fight one.

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