Use And Abuse Of Religion And Nationalism

The conflict of intertwined forces of nationalism and religion with similar opposing forces has been the cause of many horrendous wars during the last millennium. These unfortunate conflicts keep repeating themselves in varying degrees and last week we witnessed the flaring of one such incident at Dambulla which the government commendably doused out soon.
The conflicts of different nationalisms—quite often intertwined with religion— are of global occurrence and right now the Middle East is a powder keg with devastating potential.
Marxists – now a near extinct variety— will recall nonchalantly the dictum of their prophet, Karl Marx: Religion is the Opium of the People. Others will quote Samuel Johnson on Patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. We know that these observations are not universal in their application. There are billions of religious adherents who are not made insensate by their religious convictions and quite a lot of people who love their country and would not fall into the category of scoundrels of Samuel Johnson.
But it has to be admitted that there are hundreds of exceptions who exploit religion and nationalism for promoting their demagoguery. The potential demagogues lie dormant in our society and the country saw them on TV last week attempting to destroy what they described as a Muslim place of worship that they claimed had come up illegally on land belonging to the historic Dambulu Viharaya.
Read the rest here