Reply #37: My first consciousness of Israel, other than a map name, was learning about the kibbutz model.

[ConsAreLiars]

It just made good sense. We work together, share what we produce, and help one another.

It was maybe my first step toward becoming politicized, thinking about how things work in this world and how things could be better. My first step toward understanding and working for the greater good.

As an atheist since early childhood, I never thought about religious affiliation any more than shoe size. No interest. Probably for the first 50 years. And although I never found affiliation predictive of anything on a person-to-person level, I was a bit naive. True enough, there are remarkably decent and evil people with every affiliation and most in between, but I had missed seeing the manipulative and murderous aspect of these organized hierarchical power systems here and there and everywhere seeking to seize and/or retain state power. When Hindus mass murder Muslims and Buddhists mass murder Tamil Hindus and the notoriously evil Christian nations massacre Aztecs and Native American "heathens" or "abos" and Jews now against Muslims and ad infinitum and all do the same do the same in reverse,

Creating any state based on hate and fear and exclusion and exclusivity may sound appealing at first to those sharing that sense of being different and threatened (there are a lot of both us and them in that category, no matter how one defines us and them) but in doing so it launches itself on the same trajectory as other states founded on a supremacist ideology.