The moment you try to understand warfare, you'll find yourself neck-deep in bullshit. Lies, propaganda, and competing agendas ensure that every conflict gets boiled down into a neat narrative of good vs. evil, oppression vs. freedom, or whatever. Honestly, even the basic stuff we think we understand about international conflict is, at best, mostly wrong. For instance ...

6 Myth: The Overwhelming Cause Of Terrorism Is Religious Fanaticism

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Every time the news erupts with reports of another terrorist attack, pundits put pressure on our leaders to go ahead and say what everyone's thinking: The number-one cause of terrorism is religion. Usually one religion in particular. (Hint: It's not Taoism.)

Niklas Jansson

"Pastafarians declare holy war on 'gluten-free infidels.'"

This particularly seems to make a lot of sense in the case of suicide bombings. You're a lot more likely to blow yourself up if you think you're going to get an awesome deal out of it in the afterlife, right?

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In Reality:

Sure, religious extremism accounts for a lot of terrorist attacks, but it's certainly not the only motivator, or even the biggest one. The gold medalists of suicide bombings are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka -- who, despite sounding like a middle school softball team, are a completely secular group of militant communists.

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No paradise bribes for these folks.

But sure, that's somewhere in the third world, where the rules all go out the window anyway. What about here in the West? Well, according to the Global Terrorism Index put out by the Institute For Economics and Peace in 2015, Islamic fundamentalism was responsible for a whopping ... 19 percent of terrorism-related deaths in the West between 2006 and 2014. The rest were motivated by much less mystical stuff, like political extremism, anti-government sentiment, or good old-fashioned racism.

In fact, of the three biggest attacks over that time, only one (the 2009 Fort Hood attack) was religiously motivated. The other two were the 2011 attack in Oslo, Norway by white nationalist Anders Breivik, and another white guy who drove his car into a crowd in The Netherlands in an apparent attempt to kill the Dutch Queen in the least efficient way possible.