Sacred Games, Part 2

Babri Masjid mosque - 19th century photo by Samuel Bourne

The Babri Masjid mosque was mentioned in the TV show Sacred Games. It was built in the early 16th Century. It was torn down by rioting Hindus in 1992.

So I'm looking for a picture of this place and there aren't too many, it disappeared before the explosion of digital photography. I come across one with a blurb that mentions the Muslim-Hindu riots  of 1936, so I go looking for information about that and I find this:

List of riots in India

It lists well over 100 riots going back to 1832. There are 8 or 9 with death tolls over 1,000. India (mostly Hindu) and Pakistan (mostly Muslim) were partitioned in 1947 and they have been fighting a war over Kashmir ever since.

Not too long ago I posted a video - The Perils and Pitfalls of Multiculturalism - that made a certain amount of sense. Now I understand why everyone went to the Anglican church in England, and why the Spanish set the Inquisition to rooting out heresy. If you want to bind a group of people together into a cohesive whole, having a single religion can help.

However, in any established human society, you are going to have those who benefit from being on the inside of the power structure and those who suffer by being on the outside. That suffering is going to lead to grievances and eventually those grievances will boil over into riots or even civil war. So having a cohesive whole can keep things together for a while, but people being the way they are, eventually things are going to break down and then you are going to have a whole peck of trouble.

Which brings us to America and our Freedom of Religion. That worked pretty well for a couple hundred years, but now it seems a large fraction of our population has forsaken organized religion and has found new prophets on Twitter who espouse a new religion every 15 minutes. So our society is becoming very fractured.

Now we've got a fight brewing between the lords of Twitter and Elon the Great. It seems the lords of Twitter like controlling the narrative. I mean, let's not kid ourselves. That was (and still is) the primary purpose of organized religion - it's to get everyone thinking the same way. Oh, they dress it up with sound psychological advice, but when you've got a captive audience every week, you can bet that the powers that be, which included the preachers, made sure they were all selling the same story. We don't need no gadflys pointing out discrepancies in our holy stories.