SAYING A RELIGION IS GENERALLY BAD AS OPPOSED TO SAYING IT IS JUST BAD

When you complain if a religion is a threat to you and your freedoms, people will retort, "It is not all bad."  This is usually referring to the harmless people who are counted as members.  A religious identity needs to be valid in some way to mean something.  So some members are really assumed members and are not real ones.  Some will use that to their advantage and say that if a religion does harm it is not actually it doing it but the "fake" members.  It is not fair to do that.  It stops you seeing if the faith and standard set by the religion is the problem.

One solution is to distance the religion a bit from the people and say the religion is generally bad.  Individuals in it can be considered good.

Generally bad 

When  a religion is called bad, you mean generally bad.  You are not saying that every person in the religion for real or just carrying the label is necessarily intentionally bad.  That would be ridiculous. 

Every bad organisation can have okay or good people in it.  But it can never have good people in it who know what they are doing.  And you need to know what you are doing to pass as a credible representative of the religion or an emblem of what it is like.  A child in a bad religion – supposing a child really should be given a religious label for example or a person who has been forced to comply with the badness is an example of what we mean by good people in a bad religion.   

If religious people are not bad intentionally that means little.  Good intentions are not more important than the damage that happens or may happen.  A doctor who thinks holy water cures cancer is doing a lot of harm unwittingly.  Religious people not being all bad does not make them harmless or their enterprise worthy of praise.
 
Can't just dismiss the bad members
 
To say some people in a religion are good is to admit that the bad ones belong to it too and to raise the question: “Are the bad ones the faithful members not the good ones?” And to ask if there is something wrong with the religion that turns some people bad? What if one or both answers should be yes? It is also to ask if the good is enough to justify people staying in the religion.
 
Being in a religion that turns some bad is bad for the same reason as choosing bad friends is bad. To blame the bad person in a religion not the religion is to say that even if religion is to blame you will defend it. You are worse than the bad religionist or bad religion then. A truly good person will blame the system and the faith not the person if there has to be a choice. Both are to blame.
 
When a religion does harm, saying "Some members are bad but not all are" means nothing for not all are at the same stage of development in the religion. If you want to use irrelevant arguments to defend a religious system of power and doctrine then you are are part of the problem when it does or preaches violence or if it would if it got the chance.
 
To say that a religion should not be condemned for the actions of a few is to dismiss the "bad" members and thus to refuse to deal with the problem sensibly. The religion has to be looked at as a whole. It is a whole.