“The language used in recent years to ferment what is tantamount to hatred and incitment for violence against the “other” will only stop working once”

Im not sure Im as pessimistic as you. We don’t need a machine, just a just and fair society where no one in any sect feels like a minority or is scared that one sect is out to destroy another.

To get that we need politicians who are willing to work for the country rather than their sect or their cronies or their bank accounts.

The language used in recent years to ferment what is tantamount to hatred and incitment for violence against the “other” will only work once that language is no longer effective. Its not a question of removing secterian reference but removing the natural inclination of supporting the representative of ‘my’ sect who is patently dishonest over someone who is from another sect but patently more honest.

Our warlords swapped their guns for mobile phones but they still rape the country of its resources. It will be up to each sect to remove its own dishonest leaders rather than what happens now where each sect wants to nominate who leads the other sects.

Definitely on the big scale it’s nothing but a cute new addition (more like retraction) from our system. I agree with you, even though it might not be life changing, it is still something i’d definitely do, when i have time.

The steps to follow in order to have a non-sectarian country, to have a completely secular country is to remove any reference to our religion from our civil registry, and to have the parliament, the ministry, the president be voted for their qualifications and their electoral program and not their sect.
The final step is to have all Lebanese people, residents and expatriates remove any sectarian reference and xenophobia from their mind, that can be arranged with some sort of futuristic machine that can only target religious neurons in your head.
And then we live happily ever after

But it will take many years and many more measures like that to build enough trust between all Lebanese to get us to a point where we trust our politicians to do what is right by the country and not their sect or heaven forbid their bank account.

Many of today’s politicians need the sectarian divide not to remain in power but to happily abuse that position knowing no one is going to seriously challenge them because they “represent” their sect.

But for the sectarian politics to disappear the people themselves will need to stop simply supporting their own zaims just because they are the most powerful clan in that sect. In other words, we have to get out of this age old tribal mentatlity (that is lets face it a problem in most Arab countries) and start thinking with a national one.

Of course no one would *need* explicit permission from a religious authority. I’m just thinking aloud about whether there would be social pressure exerted on people not to do it, for these reasons.

As for point three, it is true that they would still be able to vote. But the point is that if we do not transition to a system where sectarianism is abolished then the political players in the bigger sects will have less and less reason to aid the emergence of a nonsectarian system, rather pushing for an adjustment of the existing system (i.e. changing the operative proportions).

One more thing you haven’t touched on regarding this. I think for those Lebanese that lived through the civil war, a war where you could be executed at any checkpoint just for having the wrong sect on your id, this move will be psychologicaly very important.