The religious divides are generally along tribal lines, however this is a religious war among people who lived together peacefully for decades, centuries in some cases, until Islamic extremists decided to start making life a living hell for everyone else.

really struck me a few years back. I don't remember it word-for-word, but the gist of it was this:

Some of my neighbors came to my house and told me to leave town immediately. I pleaded with them, "We've lived together for many years. You all came to my children's weddings, and I went to your children's weddings. What's happening now?" But they wouldn't listen to me

the kinds of irreconcilable differences and unquestioning allegiance to authority that religion fosters, it certainly can.

extensive media propaganda campaigns pushing racist/nationalist theories designed to provoke resentment and anger, as well as perpetrators who in many cases could profit materially if some of their neighbors vanished

In Nigeria, especially in the north and northwest, it is religion, in particular fundamentalist islamic jihadist theology, that is driving the conflict. That is simply a fact. You can point as much as you want at other conflicts that were not driven by religion, but that does not alter what is going on in Nigeria.

Such a remark has much in common with (say) mid-1990s accounts from the Balkans: communities with a long history of tolerance could be split along cultural lines, and the splits would perpetuate in a climate of fear and uncertainty



This suggests that the definition and marginalization of "others" has played a significant role in the recent political history of the country, which may help us understand something about exactly how opportunistic political instrumentalization of religion unfolds in Nigeria



This suggests there is actually significant diversity in Nigeria's Muslim community. It further suggests that cynicism and despair, resulting from a long history of struggles for resources and from economic marginalization, lead to distrust of the secular and religious establishment. And it also (again) suggests political manipulation of differences as a contributing factor to the problem

"Religion never motivates anyone to do anything...except when it does"

on exactly what the differences between our views are

First, we do not use the term "religion" in exactly the same way.

I think you wish to make general claims about "religion" without having any really good definition of it. I find "religion" as a sociological category to be a vague and ill-defined concept: having trained as a mathematician, I do not believe meaningful generalizations can be derived from vague ideas, so when "religion" is used in a sociological sense, I am often inclined to look sociological descriptions that seem to be more useful.

When I use "religion" as a theological category, I am referring to something rather like "the foundations of a person's being," and in that sense I expect everyone has a "religion" of some sort -- and I am sure you dislike any comments I make in that sense. "Religion" in this sense is not necessarily harmless in my view: people often behave rather badly for various reasons, springing from their choices of what will be important to them, and they are often quite good at providing high-minded-sounding rationalizations for their bad behavior, but their actual "religion" (even if they describe themselves as "religious&quot may not involve any traditional "gods" and their rationalizations do not necessarily involve any "god talk" -- the actual "gods" they worship (for example) may be themselves, and their actual "religious practice" may be their self-interested greed or it may be their own self-righteousness. In other words, I use the theological category "religion" to include a number of ways of being, many of which I regard as idolatrous and harmful, but in that case the conceptual overlap between your use of the word and my use of the word is rather slight

Second, we do not approach the sociological category "religion" from the same perspective. My development here was influenced by Marx, who is currently unpopular, despite his having had some rather profound insights:

Perhaps you have little interest in Marx, but this passage shines as a brilliant landmark in atheistic humanism. Marx is not content with the observation that religion is man-made, and he is not content simply to strip away religious belief: he wants to understand the actual source of religious belief, without losing his ethical stance and without losing his scientific perspective. His idea is to regard religious belief as a psychological projection, that allows people to discuss their hopes and disappointments in a fantastic language that represents both their current suffering and their protest against that suffering. Thus Marx maintains his sympathy with the oppressed in part by decoding their discussion of their oppression. He is not interested so much to destroy their illusions but rather to eliminate the conditions that necessarily produced the illusions

This provides an established atheistic-humanistic approach to the study of problems posed by various "religious" manifestations -- namely, one asks: What is really going on here? What are the underlying conditions that spawned this? That approach has the advantage of focusing attention on genuine material problems that real humans need solved

Third, I think I see interesting problems where you see none. When (for example) communities with a long history of religious tolerance splinter into violent competing factions, I think you feel everything important has been said once you have blame "religion" for the strife -- but since such "solution" seems glib and uninformative to me, I still want to know what has happened