HOW RELIGION CAN SET THE STAGE FOR VIOLENCE Public religion is cosmetic. The cosmetic is used to hide something dark

Religion does not sit well with choice and freedom.  This is a form of violence in itself and leads to people being actually killed.

Some Ways Religion leads to violence
 
- By "love".  People who are doing grave evil feel supported by you when you know what they do and are nice to them. That is the reality nobody wants to confess. People don’t need constant assurance that they are right. They need a friend or two to encourage them at least once and that equips them to feel others indirectly support them by seeming not to care. It is easier to do bad if everybody around you is just nice to you regardless.  And don't forget you can feel God is just as kind!

- By de-sensitisation.  Christians engage in a lot of hatred and violence on the internet and in video games and by what they watch on television.  They use the idea of sins murdering Jesus to accuse even children of murdering Jesus.  Adultery is equated with murder for killing a soul.  Masturbation is the sin of suicide against your own soul.  The idea is you "lose" your soul to God through serious sin.  Why do they want de-sensitisation? 

-By pretending that all that matters is a religion not being essentially violent. But that does not mean it is essentially peaceful either! It could go either way! We are not told that though!
 
-By pretending that any essentially violent religion is not essentially violent or by pretending religion is somehow immune to being violent and condoning violence and making violence out to be a sacred dogma. Claiming that the violence is based on a misunderstanding is assuming that those who founded the religion and gave it its doctrines were well-meaning. That is not necessarily true. They may say that you should talk to the most reasonable exponents of the religion before you dismiss it as essentially dangerous and evil. But what if these people do not follow their religion correctly? They may say that there are many ways of being a Christian or Muslim so you cannot say which professing Christian or Muslim represents true Christianity or true Islam. This is exactly the problem - what if the bad ones are in fact the perfect Christians or Muslims? And if a religion is man-made it is nonsense to say it is essentially non-violent for human beings are all capable of violence. Saying any religion is inherently good leads one to deny the role the faith taught by the religion has played in forming religious warmongers and terrorists.
 
-By teaching that you must not deliberately expose yourself to anything that makes you doubt the teachings that the divine supposedly gave to the religion. The more you try to conceal and avoid doubting thoughts the more frequent and intense the unwanted craving to doubt is going to be. Suppressing it only makes you mad at those who you see as threats to your faith and turns you into a bothersome person who only sees what she wants to see.
 
- By insulating faith from being challenged by facts and evidence - for example, Christians say that God answers your prayers but not in the way you necessarily expect so when you get an antibiotic instead of the bike you asked for this proves that prayer works! But this is merely a rationalisation and is about shielding the alleged efficacy of prayer from critique. But if this is done the tools for its justification are lost as well. Truth is put at risk meaning there is an undercurrent of hatred, sometimes latent, for those who serve the truth and those who believe end up exploited and treated like objects.
 
-By teaching that evil violent books are God's word. A book that is not violent but is open to pro-violence interpretations is still to blame for any violence done by believers. A really edifying book takes pains to avoid giving any impression to readers that violence is okay or necessary.
 
-By making the more peaceful interpretation of those books a mere matter of opinion or preference meaning that if you follow it your trust in it will be weak and those co-religionists who crave war will see you as sufficiently though reluctantly opening the door in principle to their nasty interpretations. Holy books that are from God will minimise as much as possible the need for interpretation. They are not plain enough. Thus any violence that is defended by appealing to their statements is their fault for it should be clearer.
 
-By teaching that other religions or secularists are the enemy
 
-By teaching that if God commands violence we must obey for he knows best and he uses evil to bring good out of it. Even to internalise this principle is bad. It says something about you. Non-violent believers accept this violent principle hypothetically but that makes the filth in their hearts no less real.
 
-By prayer. Prayer is making yourself feel you have done good when you have not. People who like prayer get that buzz. That is why they like prayer. It has led to the extraordinary spectacle of terrorists and abortionist Catholics coping with the evil they do by saying prayers.
 
-By motivating terrorists through encouraging its members to think they are part of God's plan and God's plan does include tolerating violence for he is said to let evil happen for his and our own ultimate good. Terrorists do not use a proper military strategy to defeat whoever they are against but they do it recklessly in order to make a religious or political point and to make society feel endangered and threatened. Without religion there would just be the political point to worry about and though the state will act against terrorists who claim to act in its name religion refuses to disown its terrorists.
 
- By using the No True Scotsman fallacy to get away with evil and to keep the ideology strong and put people into denial that it is harmful. It easily becomes or encourages the No True Nationalist attitude. What does the notion that religion is essentially good mean? It may mean the core is good but is a core really good when it slots itself in a heap of excrement? Or it may mean that religion is always good and that whoever does bad in the name of religion is not being a religious person even if they pray as they kill babies. And it denies the truth that working out what is good can be messy dangerous business meaning there is a risk with our moral and religious systems.
 
-If you worship God you necessarily worship a being who gives many people violent genes, and who gives everybody genes that make them enjoy the misfortunes of another, and who is ultimately responsible for the existence of political institutions. Religion and faith in God involve YOU taking responsibility for worshipping such a God and approving of the evil he creates. And if there is no God the responsibility is yours by proxy. Do not add insult to injury by saying that no truly religious person would condone or do violence. They have to and there are countless examples. Some say that faith in God or gods is not to be blamed for religious violence and that God or the gods cause the violence and inspire it in the belligerent. I don't know how they expect to be taken seriously.
 
-If you believe in a perfectly good God, you must say that evil is good that is used wrongly. So evil becomes the absence of good. Violence becomes the absence of peace. Peace usually is not real peace but just war not happening. Too often, peace means that people are experiencing good conditions but is it real peace? It is only provisional peace until the good things they have are threatened and then war breaks out. And each religious country blesses its favourites with peace. Many groups are left out of the equation. Another difficulty is that if a religion or group is considered pacifist, it may not wage war but it makes up for it by battering children and wives and spewing hatred. Such groups are no better than the non-pacifists or the population in general. And religion creates new "needs" to get aggressive and protective about - eg, a religious nation will persecute missionaries who enter it to bring in another religion. Lucretius noted that once you start needing and craving beyond the bare necessities you start taking baby steps to becoming a warmonger.
 
-Many faiths such as Christianity believe that Jesus will war one day against the evildoers. They may claim to be non-violent but that is a lie. They love deferred violence.
 
-The notion that you can wage war in God’s name and be assured that God will protect you or will not retaliate (at least not much!) if you think the war is lawful when it is not can encourage you to maim and kill. And more importantly, it SHOULD.
 
-In many cases, violence WOULDN'T have taken place without religion. It proves that religion is not immune to causing strife and would cause it. But even if the violence would have taken place without the religion, what does that say about the religion? That it would cause it even if it does not.
 
-In many cases, violence COULDN'T have taken place without religion.
 
-Religion is to blame for violence when the amount of the violence or the number of the violent is above what is normal statistically and when any other possible cause has been shown unlikely or eliminated or just to possess a minor role. Religious people too often try to get you to just assume religion is always good when they should be getting you to collect and check the evidence for and against. Finding evidence that religion can sometimes be bad is enough to prove that religion and good are not the same thing. Keeping you away from evidence-based thinking is a typical tactic and manipulative religionists are notorious for it.
 
-If Satan uses human enemies to do evil, and Christianity says this is his favoured method, then it is always self-defence to attack them first.
 
-Human nature is not intrinsically good so if non-religious people engage in violent extremism or religious people engage in it, it is a demonstration of how there is nothing intrinsically good about anything human - even religion. To say religion is good is to be lie and you will only tell that lie if you want to cover up the violence.