The Polytheistic Religion of Nationalism

Nationalism is a polytheistic faith in invisible entities whose wills are purported to be performed by the numerous priests and high-priests of this faith in the various fields of politics, the military, education, etc. The deities worshipped are often mutually antagonistic, and the greatest of these gods, ie those with the greatest number of believers, or perhaps most virile or fundamentalist believers, desire the murder and annihilation of other gods whose followers can then, if they are sufficiently worthy, become converts to the greater god, whose greatness has been proven by his defeat, in the persons of his followers, of the other god's followers. If not worthy, they can become slaves to the nationalist god to whom they are now subject.

The gods of nationalism often desire offerings in the way of human sacrifice, and to this end wars are fought. The gods are also often placated by the lesser offerings such as subjection of sacrificial victims to torture and imprisonment.

Within this field of metaphysical deities and the human structures that serve them are some dangerous souls who believe that the gods of nationalism do not actually exist at all, but that they are purely mental fabrications used by the priests and high-priests of these supposed religions to justify their own egotistical interests and will to power. These atheists warn that nationalism is often a tool of manipulation of the masses by ruling elites, and the typically blood-thirsty deities they claim to serve are simply their own wills projected onto an imaginary divine entity which cloaks the true nature of their actions in a foggy, mystical aura.
The atheist would prefer a statement such as "America/The Soviet Union(tick where appropriate) has attacked Afghanistan" be rendered as "The fuckers that run America/Soviet Union have attacked Afghanistan."

Admittedly, we have entered a more complex issue here where The Soviet Union saw the apparent spiritual union of various nationalist deities into one far greater deity, but this evolutionary progression suffered an unexpected dissolution and the old deities reconvened into their separate selves. Victor Pelevin has an interesting and unusual hypothesis in his book, Babylon, regarding this where he says: "The USSR which they'd begun to renovate and improve...improved so much that it ceased to exist(if a state is capable of entering nirvana, that's what must have happened in this case)."

There are those who wish for a single all ruling god over all the Earth, and these monotheists are known as Globalists. These globalists, needless to say, intend to be be the high-priests of this all-powerful divine entity, should their aims be realised. It would be anathema to this priestly class' notion of reality but possibly they are to be the unwitting vehicle of Pelevin's idea where the One World State will be realised only to dissolve itself through an enlightenment experience where the individual ego sense of this deity is transcended, and an enlightened anarchy ensues. This mirroring St Francis' notion of organised Christianity's desired end being its own dissolution; religion being the means to a higher end in terms of individual life and consciousness rather than an end in itself- a dangerous notion which nearly cost him an unpleasant death at the hands of the Inquisition, a body far more organised than religious. Though perhaps these committers of satanic acts were very religious; they just weren't quite being truthful about the nature of the religion they believed in...a tree shall be known by its fruit and all that. The idea that people clearly immersed in evil might lie seems a strangely undervalued notion.