Remember back when Saddam had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? Everybody believed it? The news was on and on about how reliable it was? How this was an absolute truth? Skepticism was condemned as evil and wanting us to be killed? Then this brought us to war. We invaded Iraq to disarm them of their weapons of mass destruction only to find out that there weren't any. This is pretty much religion.
You have a large number of people talking about something, without evidence, in the most absolute of terms. This is religion. Not believing this will lead to eternal hellfire and damnation. This is religion. This unsubstantiated belief lead to war and death and killing on no real grounds. This is religion. The media, the government, the apologists all happened to be lock step though without discussing it. This is religion. The bad intelligence summed up to be group think. This is religion. Once proven wrong the apologists start making silly excuses such as 'God needs faith', or 'the WMDs were taken to Syria'. This is religion.
Really, if you want evidence that you can get vast number of people to believe a lie on no evidence and get that evidence to lead to war... look no further than the cradle of civilization. The source and destination for that kind of nonsense.
As a funny little side, somebody on some TV show made the comment that everybody believed that Iraq had WMD, while my sister was visiting from Washington. We both sort of raised our hands to signify our exemption to that statement. Though that was mostly because I had read Alternet at the time and came across some great arguments that it was all poppycock prior to the war, and she was the one who highly recommended Alternet to the rest of the family.
And as a side objection to this looking back and blaming people for believing what they were told. It's not as blame worthy to tell somebody something and have them believe it, than it is blameworthy to tell somebody something which is false.
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