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As Nan put it, organized politics *does* boil down to politics, particularly once nationalism become involved. I dont believe Milosevic did his thing in Bosnia to "protect Christian Orthodoxy" any more than I believe that Albright nuked Belgrade to "defend the interest of Papacy" (as some Yugos believe). As far as the Israeli-Palestinian question is concerned, the conflict is much deeper than Religion. And Hitler obviously did not perpetrate the Holocaust due to an opposition to Judaism as a religion; he saught a scapegoat to advance his political scemes.
The role of religion has varied widely in Greek history. In polytheistic Greece there was the lack of a codified, organized, dogmatic religion, and there were even statues "to the unknown Gods". As a matter of fact, back then (and even nowadays, but unfortunately to a lesser extent), one of the most offending Greek insults is to call someone "misallodoxos" (i.e., to "a hater the other's belief or religion". The adoption of Christianity (despite the futile attempts by the Emperor Julian philosophers such as Plethon) gave Greeks a first taste of organized religion during the Eastern Roman ("Byzantine") Empire where religion became a means to a political end . The Eastern Roman Empire was a political union of a mosaic of ethnicities throughout Europe and the Middle East, where "Eastern Orthodoxy" bacame the unifying link. The "enemy" was the "Western Roman Empire" personified, inter alia, by Charlemagne, the Francs and the Pope. The scorn between the two "Roman Empires" ultimately caused the downfall of Constantinople, as the Byzantines preferred to be subjugated by the Ottomans than the "Franks"....a long and painful story, which I can ramble on about incessantly. But I'll spare you :P