On October 7th of this year, Palestinian Sunni Muslims, members of Hamas, got out of bed, participated in morning prayers, and then crossed the border into Israel and slaughtered over 1400 Jews who were just going about their daily business. They did this because they don’t like Jews and are surrounded almost exclusively by others who don’t like Jews.

Now, a few weeks later, the Israeli Defense Force is in the process of turning the Gaza Strip, home of Hamas, into a parking lot. And though I believe that Hamas brought this retribution on themselves and that Israel is far more disciplined when it comes to discerning between combatants and noncombatants, innocent people are still being killed. I’m also quite sure that almost every Rabbi in Israel is onboard.

That’s the way that it is in the Middle East, where the Jews, the Sunnis, and the Shias have been at each other’s throats for centuries, with no end in sight. They all can find plenty of justification for hatred in the tenets that comprise their disparate belief systems.

In the United States, there are also three great tribes: the left, the right, and the Christians. They have one thing in common: a seemingly endless capacity to embrace hypocrisy to justify whatever they want.

Let’s start with the left. Modern-day progressivism, as it is practiced in this country, might as well be a religion. It has all of the hallmarks of faith. The progressive canon consists of DEI, social justice, and a smug belief in their intellectual and moral superiority over the hoi polloi beyond their realms in academia, government, and the media.

Progressive tactics to punish heretics are a hybrid of McCarthyism and the Catholic Inquisition of the Middle Ages. About the only thing progressives haven’t yet comped from the Inquisition is some form of modern auto-da-fé, though I’m sure that it’s a work in progress.

Then there’s the right. Modern-day conservatism in this country is two things: not really conservative, and just as concerned with rooting out and punishing heretics as the progressives they despise.

The biggest functional difference between the right and the left is that the right actually has an official religion, Christianity. And by ignoring virtually everything that Jesus stood for, the right feels entirely justified in doing all that they can to eradicate the left, starting immediately after they get out of church each Sunday.

Then there is Christianity itself. Christianity is currently far and away the dominant religion in this country, but its days appear numbered. Younger people in this country are increasingly irreligious, and to the degree that some still are, their numbers skew towards other faiths.

Religion is the ultimate in tribalism. Almost every major religious denomination of which I’m aware holds, as a basic tenet, that their view of the world is exclusively correct. That non-believers are children of lesser gods. That no one is going to heaven, paradise, or the celestial kingdom unless they get with the program.

There are hundreds of major religious denominations in our country, and they can’t all be simultaneously right. If God does actually exist, she, he, or it must have a robust sense of humor to have made all of this so opaque and difficult for any reasonable person who really wants to know to sort out.

I am, as I have written here before, irreligious. But I’m agnostic, if you will forgive the pun, when it comes to the religious beliefs of others. Some people, in my view, benefit from their faith. But many more do not. And the tribalism on display by many “people of faith” is less than a great advertisement for their systems of belief. The hypocrisy that I see in many

devoutly religious people would be funny, except for the fact that it’s not.

Years ago, I ran a musical production company. In the course of operating this business, I had the opportunity to work with dozens of high-caliber, Grammy-award-winning artists. It was pure joy, and I cherished every minute of it, up until the end.

At one point, I struck up a friendship with an artist with whom I worked during the 2002 Winter Olympics. This gentleman was a member of a musical group that had won multiple Grammy awards. He was pleased with how we produced his gospel music show during the Olympic festival and wanted to continue the partnership.

I struck up a deal to bring this artist to Idaho later that year to headline a summer festival. A couple of weeks before the show, the organization that was sponsoring the festival asked me to fax them a headshot. About 15 minutes after I sent the fax, they called me in for an emergency meeting.

When I arrived, the entire board was in the room. Suddenly, they had a lot of questions about the show, and in particular about the artist. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was actually going on; they didn’t know that the artist was black until I sent them his photo.

I won’t go into this any further simply because it’s still too painful, 21 years later, for me to think about for very long. One of the most gut-wrenching moments of my life, which has been filled with them, was when I realized that they were going to pass on the show because the artist bore the “mark of Cain.”

Almost every person in that room, except me, was a member in good standing of a church. And not a single one of them saw anything wrong with blackballing an artist because of the color of his skin. That, in a nutshell, is tribalism for you. And that’s why I think it has irredeemable issues.

Many religious people use the get-out-of-jail-free, forgiveness for faith card as a convenient justification for excusing a lifetime of inconsideration of others. For what it’s worth, I think that those folks had better hope that I’m right and that they are not. Because if there really is a gatekeeper to the afterlife with a book that contains all of everyone’s deeds, just being dead might be a better alternative than what may await.

I've long maintained that many of the religious believe the same things that I do when it comes to spirituality, or they’d behave a whole lot differently. You can’t sincerely believe in an afterlife obtained through good deeds and perform very few.

Not every religious person, of course, is like this. I know people of all faiths who are wonderful ambassadors for their beliefs. I know a family here in my town who runs a ministry that is everything Christianity is cracked up to be. They are wonderful people. The thing is, I think that these folks would be just as wonderful if they’d never come across Christianity. They’d make excellent Muslims, Hindus, or atheists. It’s just the way that they are wired.

Tribalism is a crutch. It doesn’t matter whether it’s politics, religion, or anything else (except for sports, where it’s kind of fun); it’s an aid for those unable to confront the complexity of life on its own terms.

In a world filled with difficulty and things that require patience to grasp, it’s beyond tempting to find something that’s simple to understand and easy to hang onto. In a world filled with disorder, putting one’s faith in something that superimposes order on disorder, even filled with dogma that is absurd and often toxically antisocial, offers hope and comfort.

That, in a nutshell, is why tribalism exists. It’s surrendering to an external locus of control for things that seem too big to take on. But we have to fight that. Yes, some things are hard to deal with. But learning how to do so is far better than surrounding yourself with those who hope that getting a bunch of people to believe the same nonsense about intractable problems is the same as solving them.