Deconstructing Religious Violence

I just read The Rumpus Long Interview with Steven Soderbergh. Near the end, the director begins to lament what little effect film actually has on society's problems, and he makes a particularly insightful statement:

Any discussion about the Middle East that doesn’t start with whether monotheism is a good thing or a bad thing is an irrelevant discussion. This is all based on the fact that some people think that a certain piece of land that was host to some events two thousand years ago has magic meaning. I don’t believe that. I think dirt is dirt. Why people are still fixated on this idea of having this particular piece of dirt – I don’t understand it. That dirt isn’t worth one life to me. So you can sit and talk about who had what when and that, but it goes back to a deeper question of our need to create a narrative with this force that is acting upon us. Until we address whether that’s smart or dumb nothing’s going to get solved.

Putting aside the issue of whether stories about the middle east can be told without addressing monotheism, he's right, of course; dirt is dirt. If one were to take some gravel from the Temple Mount and display it next to some similar-looking soil taken from any other spot on Earth -- no rabbi or imam could tell the difference between the two samples. Yet Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been enthusiastically murdering one another for centuries over that soil in Jerusalem. In recent years Israelis have defended their illegal settlements in Palestinian territory by claiming that the land was gifted to them by God. There will always be trouble when deities dole out real estate, not the least because some of the affected parties consider said deity to be non-existent.

Soderbergh's assertion reminded me of an article by Lance Morrow I'd read years ago, and saved for this particular paragraph:

Two monotheisms is one too many in a small, bitter place. Jerusalem is a holy city, God help it — palpably, magically holy. That's the trouble. Holiness makes people crazy. David Ben-Gurion toyed with the idea, when Israel was just starting, of tearing down the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem — a blasphemous idea, until you look behind it to see the point: People cannot lead normal lives in a manifestly holy place, especially one so dogmatically contested. They are subject to ecstacies, and there is nothing worse than ecstatic violence, which is the form that religion may take when it goes into politics; absolutism does not like to share, and considers whatever gruesome aggressions it may commit to be justified as self-defense. Religious indignation expresses itself as massacre.

Morrow's final sentence calls to mind a particularly famous quote from Blaise Pascal's Pensées (which ironically was a defense of the Christian faith):

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

I wish George Mitchell the best of luck in his new endeavor. In the meantime, I'd like to see Soderbergh remake The Passion of the Christ; I have a feeling I'd prefer his version to Mel Gibson's.