So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb. As noted earlier, in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation-states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism, or Jewish
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