Religion continues to be associated with violent fanaticism, as religion-inspired horror occurs with "unceasing regularity. Whether the struggles occur among Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus in India, or between Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem".

No major world religion has avoided generating violence extremist movements from within its ranks. This has been the case "since time immemorial".

Religion-inspired violence is the stimulus for some people to call for the abandonment of religion altogether - it's not worth the risk.

Monotheism has bred the most violent individuals and cultures due its intolerance of 'other' gods and a general strictness on the specifics of belief but, other forms of religion also breed antisocial and violent individuals. Public opinion (in the USA) correctly rates Islam, Christianity and Hinduism as the most violent religions (64%, 9% and 4% said so); Judaism was rated last at 2%.

Three factors lead believers into uncivil behaviour:

1. The irrationality of belief.

2. the legitimization given to actions by beliefs in higher authorities, without the teaching of any critical and skeptical way of judging between claims as to what those higher authorities would want. For some people, voices in their heads are all that are required as long as they believe in god(s) which have authority to speak to them. For others, including atheist skeptics, such voices are immediate warning signs of impending mental ill health.

3. An otherworldly idealism and fixation with the corruptness, evilness or immorality of this world often pushes groups into extreme isolation where they cease to consider outsiders to be worthwhile human beings. Both irrational and criminal behaviour are given freer rein within religious systems of thought, as is suicide to escape this world and move on to the 'next'. Mass suicide, shoot-outs, gas attacks and other atrocities have befallen groups whose main thing in common is self-isolation from wider society, and a dread of a generally Christian-themed apocalyptic judgement-day. Many such groups emerged from mainstream religious movements and gradually became more and more sectarian over time.

The main causes that allow this slip are insipid supernaturalism, poor education, sectarian schooling and a lack of critical thinking.

source: http://www.humanreligions.info/violence_and_crime.html

Religious Wars: Politics and Culture (Example: Nigeria and India)

Many religious wars have a political and cultural component. Often it is not just two groups of people fighting over religion, but, one culture fighting another. Some defend religion in general by saying that societal divisions are the main factor in such conflicts. However, such divisions are themselves worsened by the adhering to religious identities. Religion is not only just another way of separating them, but, it is often intrinsic to the religion that non-believers are less moral or less worthy. It seems that religious texts actively promote sectarianism, and, given that this is the case, even where cultural factors play a role in mass violence it seems that religion often makes it worse and is sometimes the cause of the conflict in the first place.

For example in Nigeria from 1990 to 2007, 20,000 have been killed specifically in the name of religion. The country is divided between Christians and Muslim, and religious identity is highly important, more so than nationalism or any other element of identity. These problems are a feature of the entire region. This data comes from a report by The Economist in 2007, they summarize: "Evangelical Christians, backed by American collection-plate money, are surging northwards, clashing with Islamic fundamentalists, backed by Saudi petrodollars, surging southwards". Although Africa is the front-line, both groups of believers are supported financially and organisationally by their respective Churches around the world. Just as Iran and Israel support armed groups that antagonize each other in various countries of the Middle East, Africa is another front line between Islamic and Christian battles for power.

The them-and-us attitude is not just prevalent in monotheistic religions. India has seen much violence in the name of religion since the 1990s, as Hindu religionists are becoming increasingly anti-Christian and anti-Muslim. Churches have been burned down, Missionaries violently repelled, priests murdered, tens of thousands of Christians have fled their homes and in many states laws exist to make it harder to convert to Christianity, in contradiction to all ideas of equality and freedom of religion. Converts to Christianity are typically very poor, yet, there is an uproar against expanding welfare schemes that cover poor Hindus. If the instigators and the victims both decided to give up religion, then, there would be one less label for those fellow Indians to use to divide each other.

It is not the case that the "real" problem is with culture or language rather than with religion. National problems with communities that speak different languages are made much more problematic when those differences also coincide with religious differences, such as in Sri Lanka, where Hindu Tamils are opposed to Buddhist Sinhalese8. "The former Yugoslavia has broken into so many parts largely because of growing hostility between Muslims (mostly Bosnians) and Christians (Serbs and Croatians)"8. The religious difference "often plays a more important role than language", writes anthropologist Christophe Jaffrelot. He continues:

“... language-based multiculturalism is easier to maintain than religious-based multiculturalism, as illustrated by the integration of Quebec into Canada and of the Dravidian states into the Indian Union. This is probably due to the fact that federalism can help to diffuse tensions more effectively between linguistic groups than between religious communities. But it is also due to the emotional power of religion. Devotees are more ready to mobilize in defense of their religion because of its sacred, hence imperative, character.”
"Religion and Nationalism" by Christophe Jaffrelot (2011)

This page will not, however, concentrate on large-scale cultural-religious conflicts and instead concentrate on the activities of criminal and violent religious folk acting in a more individual role.

The Role of Strange Beliefs

The promotion of strange beliefs and associated mindsets is a danger of religious thought in general. For example, when Eden Strang attacked worshippers at a Church in South London, UK, in 1999, he was later found by the courts to be insane. He attacked the congregation because he thought they were demons in human form. But if he didn't believe in demons, then, there is a chance his actions would have been different. He told psychiatrists that God had ordered him to do it. Whilst it is true that most God-believers don't start murdering people; it is also true that they are one step closer to killing in the name of god than atheists who don't believe in gods.

“Once people convince themselves that they have been put on Earth as instruments in some divine plan, there seems to be no limit to the horrors they are willing to commit to carry out that plan.” "Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science" by Robert L. Park (2008)

Take Mohammed Merah, a French national originally from Algeria, whose story was told by The Economist (2012).

His beliefs led him to the wild conclusion that in order to be rewarded by God and thusly to live forever in paradise, he had to conduct a series of terror attacks in France. He did so, killing four adults and three children. He did it because in France, no-one is allowed to wear complete face and body coverings in public. But his victims included members of an Israeli family who were not even French and therefore were completely unrelated to the ban on complete body coverings - Mohammed Merah's excuse was that he also opposed Israel because it was also an enemy of Islam. When they raided his house on 2014 Mar 22, he shot and killed three paratroopers, before being himself killed.

Try to imagine, exactly, how it is that this immoral monster can think that God endorses his actions? Because he has very strange beliefs, but not only that, but that he believes he must act on those beliefs no matter what. Only religion can instill such a dramatic sense of ultimate urgency and divine necessity upon murderers.

Prevention

To prevent the sectarianism and isolation that leads religious groups to the most atrocious actions is a difficult task in a free society; people are free to join groups and live with friends (call it a commune if you want), and are also free to believe crazy things. To stop social groups, even just exclusive ones, is a severe reduction in freedom and almost definitely not worth it on the balance. Restricting living arrangements would disrupt ethnic groups, religious groups and all kinds of innocent behaviour. It is impossible and reprehensible to try and police beliefs: that type of behaviour is a symptom of extremism, not a cause of it. Yet these three elements, when taken together, can lead to everything from mass suicide to genocidal attacks on humanity as a whole. The cure cannot be to deal with the errant groups as they emerge, but to stop them emerging in the first place.

Causes of the isolation of these groups stem from their social unacceptability; they feel rejected because others (accurately) judge their ideas as absurd. They reject the world just as it rejects them. This leads to the them-and-us attitude in extremo. The outcries against "cults" in the press, and official investigations, all feed the fire, but the government cannot fail to investigate pseudo-criminal groups, as things like child welfare are at stake.

1. Education should be secular, inclusive and mixed. This means emphasis on difference of belief, without assuming any particular belief system is true, and an abandonment of schools that split people along religious (or ethnic) lines (this applies during home education too).

2. Cult-bashing reactionary news broadcasts that actively attack small, isolated communities always make the situation worse. Engagement should be educational and sympathetic towards followers, not judgemental and aggressive (which makes them isolate themselves more).

3. The presentation of scientific reality in easy-to-understand terms on TV, complete with reality-based interpretations of spiritual-seeming events. Too much TV assumes that many otherworldly ideas about reality are true, and far too little employs any evidence-based skeptical thinking. A more responsible take on what beliefs mass media products encourage should be taken.

4. Beliefs in afterlife, god(s) and spiritual ideas should ideally be tempered with reasonable levels of doubt and common sense. Merely saying that this should be so doesn't help, however, so it is up to the three points above to bring this recommended state closer!

this is an interesting thread

Shouldn't bother any atheists, we just apes. We can do whatever the hell we want, in the end all those folks are doing is rearranging molecules.

Richirich713:
Shouldn't bother any atheists, we just apes. We can do whatever the hell we want, in the end all those folks are doing is rearranging molecules.

it must feel good getting this nonsense off your chest, doesn't it?

Pastafarian:


it must feel good getting this nonsense off your chest, doesn't it?

Explain to me how it's nonsense.