Anyone else certain team Rabbit is in the foreground, with team duck the group further away?

A true duck believer!!

Ears stick to the left, rabbit faces right.

Weren't the crusades also just a Papal project to reduce the intensity of European wars by dumping excess military capacity into colonising the Middle East?

This take on it is especially weird to me because I initially saw the young face, but as soon as I saw the old one it became impossible to see the "ear" as anything but an eye.

I can still kinda see the young face but the ear doesn't compute anymore. it feels wrong.

On one hand, that's a good point. On the other hand, even in such an extreme example you had nonsense like Catholic France fighting on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War, so clearly they weren't fighting for religion then. This means that even such a massive, explicitly religious conflict had a political dimension that could outweigh the religious dimension for some participants.

The Shi'a Sunni sectarianism was helped (at least in Syria) by the US government.

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06DAMASCUS5399_a.html

It's weird that you can't see that the metaphor is for all religions.

Here's a great one to make you think about Christianity's version.

*New link, same joke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANNX_XiuA78

It's this, literally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit–duck_illusion

The young woman's chin is the old woman's nose

In the old woman version you're supposed to see it as a ruffled collar and her head as angled down, her chin kind of sitting on the collar

And what is the shoulder part of her clothes doing in front of her? Either it's the young woman or the old wears weird clothes or can twist her neck in a creepy way

She's waering an ear bud

TIL. Thanks for the reference!

Late reply, but beautiful!

Having been through this conversation regarding slavery and the US Civil War, the tool we need is necessary and sufficient. Is a proposed cause of the war necessary for the war to have started? And is the proposed cause alone enough, by itself, to have started the war? If both conditions are true, then you can say that is the cause of the war.

I think if you look at least of a few of the European Crusades into Holy Land, you'll see religion meets this standard.

You sound like those radical heliocentrics.

From what I’ve been told it’s still a pretty persistent cultural problem, but I’m not Indian, so take that with a grain of salt.

Disclaimer: I think it's obviously true that at least some conflicts can be considered to have been caused by religion, my issue is more in how common and how big those conflicts are.

So there are two problems here: First is the fact that these hypotheticals for the most part can't be untangled with any degree of objectivity. Second is the question of how to evaluate religion's impact on direction versus magnitude. Which is to say, it's entirely possible that you have the conditions for a war that simply need something to shape them into a coherent conflict. Your example is actually pretty illustrative here, so lemme just:

I think if you look at least of a few of the European Crusades into Holy Land, you'll see religion meets this standard.

The problem here is that religion was so tied up in the culture and institutions of the time that it's nearly impossible to envision a Medieval Europe without religion (see first problem). The thing about the Crusades is that they were directed by the Church, which was eager to assert its influence, and you don't even have the Church without religion. But then you don't get nothing, because the other thing the Church was doing was trying to reduce conflict between Christians, so the Crusades were essentially the Church redirecting this violence externally; without that you don't get less conflict, just different conflict (see second problem). Historically the lack of overarching authority to direct violence tends to lead to more rather than less violence (essentially a corollary of the square-cube law), so "just get rid of the authority holding a notoriously fragmented and warlike region together" isn't exactly a recipe for less conflict. If we instead imagine that the authority holding Western Europe together was secular (as much as anything can be secular in this period), then the number of warlike fragmented regions that didn't expand violently after being politically unified throughout history is indistinguishable from zero. The analogues here would be the Italians (under Rome) or Mongols, not exactly the most peaceful peoples.

So to get back to your heuristic, the Church undeniable caused the Crusades, but it'd be a much harder sell to say that without the Crusades there wouldn't be something else in its place.

Sure, there's always more going into a conflict that just one thing, the question is how do you sort out which ones are important enough to be considered causal.

Ladies and gentlemen! There is no need to fight, come to the white base assembly

you underestimate Shia/Sunni animosity.

it was a thing for centuries before that

I mean my counterargument here is that religion didn't cause the Crusades (or a reskin thereof); the existence of an authority able to push the European nobility in the same direction did. You either remove that authority and get limitless endemic conflict or reskin that authority to make it non-religious and get different-looking conflict instead, and neither of these options are an upgrade over the Crusades in terms of amount of violence. Which is to say: Christianity took a whole host of potential conflicts and made some of them reality; it didn't create conflict where none would've existed otherwise. For example, the English and French had been done Crusading into the Holy Land for only a few decades when the Hundred Years' War hit.

Who is NickSawRickShaw and why is that a message link to him

Same shit just different color.

And this was different for Christianity, you think? Even today there is still violence though be it less than, say, a few hundred years ago. Basically people became leas religious and stopped accepting the bullshit religious hate and the violence that came with it

Ban all religions

Turn the image 90° clockwise, it helps to see the rabbit.

Partly. The first Crusade had a lot to do with the Seljuks winning at Manizkert, which left the Byzantines needing help from Western Europe to take back their lands. They also wanted to direct knights violence at a common enemy as you said, but from the soldiers and knights to the 4 princes to Peter the hermit and Pope Urban II, all of them truly believed they were religiously called to reclaim the holy land. It's kind of the opposite of those modern conflicts, it was a religious war with political overtones. The balance of religion and politics as motivating factors is different for each crusade.

Similarly, you could make an argument that Muhammed was motivated in his early conquests by political and territorial ambition, but he and his followers truly believed they were following divine orders. There's always a mix of the two in those conflicts and it's a sliding scale.

Sunday bloody Sunday isn't that far off

Shia vs Sunni, Catholic vs Protestant, and so on.

The potential for an explosive event full of horror is always there, because all of the Abrahamic faiths say that only they are magically wise, and the "other" is worthy of death.

That scriptural endorsement has been and always will be fuel for the stupid and violent to do what they are naturally inclined to do. The Bible, Koran, and Tanakh all claim the same thing. "You are granted special magic super brain powers; they are stupid, inferior, and damned".

So, the "they" always has motivation and even a moral imperative to kill the "other".

... and to this day, these "faiths" are tax free. they're all fabulously wealthy, but still, we must pay fealty

Don't ban it, they only flourish. The banning grants them legitimacy.

Tax it. Stop making exceptions for them. It will die all on its own.

Heathen!

Yes, but the examples in recent history are often instigated. Like salafists wouldn't have anywhere near the same influence without Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia basically wouldn't exist without US support.

Saudis are such a can of worms its not even funny

this is it!