re: #99 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

Mostly, but I think we need to be careful about becoming too reductionist.

“Fundamentalist absolutism” can apply to any action by a human.

What I think we are seeing in India has more to do with old fashioned nationalism, which rides on the back of an older angst by Hindus of encroaching “Abrahamicists.”

The nationalism gets particularly amped up in this current context of Kashmir, where the political boundaries, of Pakistan vs. India, is a prominent force in Indian political life.

So this then becomes a chicken-n-egg problem (which is not really a problem in biology - the egg came first). Does war over a boundary drive religious hatred, or did religious hatred drive the political border?

Yet clearly the turmoil of Hindu nationalism in India has a religious component - which is why I posted about the Dalits getting attacked by Bos fundamentalists.

It can be nearly impossible, and in some cases truly impossible, to divorce a person from their religious indoctrination. It’s very, very hard to unlearn a pattern.

Centuries of a growing secular worldview, combined with the enormous success of the undertaking of “science” as a human endeavor, puts all the old belief systems at risk.

And they know it.