Students beat classmate to death screaming Allahu Akbar (New graphic video)

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JWeinCom said:

If you actually believe the bible to be divine, then you can't logically ignore parts you don't like.  At least not without cognitive dissonance.  

As for literally anything can be used as a catalyst for violence, no not really.  Throughout history, there are patterns of certain things consistently leading to violence.  Religion is one of the big ones.  Nationalism is probably a close second.  Things that divide people into factions, American vs non-American, saved vs damned, muslim vs infidels, are particularly effective at causing violence.  Another key element is when something is beyond question.  

Religion has a special ability to be used for evil because of its priveleged status, the way people are indoctrinated, and the obedience it instills.  Take for instance the catholic church.  Generally, parents would not leave their child alone with a man you sort of know who is not in your family.  As a teacher, there are tons of things in place to prevent us from doing anything innapropriate to children (although not always effective).  But, since people were trained with the idea that priests are holy, they left their kids in the priest's care.

Afterwards, the vatican actively shuffled pedophiles around the globe to avoid a scandal.  If any other organization were caught in something like this, that would be the end of it.  Yet the catholic church can endure it.  Because it is supposedly ordained by god.  

That's an example of a kind of abuse that could really only happen with religion.  Sure there are many cases of molestation that take place outside the church, but the scale of it is almost impossible to imagine being carried out by any other group.   There are tons of other examples I could use too.  

Of course violence would still occur if religion disappeared.  I never said it wouldn't.  But, we'd be taking away one of the most effective tools in driving people to violence, and we'd eliminate a large chunk of it.  Individuals do not exist in a vacuum.  They are influenced by the environment around them.  A person with violent tendencies may or may not act them out depending on the environment they find themselves in.  We've seen pretty consistently that religious environments are much better at promoting violence.

Cognitive dissonance is one way to put it, lazy catholics or muslims is another way of putting it. Meaning they want to believe but do they really? The brain is a very logical processing device and if you speak to a lot of Atheists who used to be religious people, many will tell you that they more wanted to believe due to fear of no after life. Many things are at play here. This would take forever to cover and my point only really pertains to the inherent nature of the mind versus the lack of inherent nature of religion.

For sure certain conditions can be more of a catalyst, as I said before religion is the most followed system so it would make sense for it to show up on top.

Nothing is ever beyond question, and if someone tells you it is then that is on them, not religion. It is up to the human brain to make decisions, religion cannot be inherently bad.

Listen, we could sit here and exchange stories all day about how religion does good and religion does evil, at the end of the day it's the people behind it. I could talk about Muhatma Ghandi who helped over 200 million people feel like they were loved. I could delve into Mother Teresa or the countless sermon's. You could then counter with The Crusade and we would have this talk all day. What this proves though is that religion is not inherently bad or inherently good, it depends on the people pushing an ideology in said direction. This can happen to any ideology, not just religion, but religion is the most followed so you are going to have more points against religion, that's just how statistics works.

I don't agree with children being raped and those that commited those unthinkable acts should be more than held accountable (many have been). This is due to the institutionalised manner of the power that an institution can have, not just with religion, it has little to do with God so much as a group of people exercising their power in very immoral ways. There have been too many scandals in every walk of life with or without religion (capitalism/politics very close behind religion) to say that kids got raped due to God. But yes, this is bad that rape takes place with those kinds of people, they are sick in the head.

More people are molested outside of church than inside of church by an absolutely MASSIVE margin. You don't need religion to create bad environments but you weren't talking about that, I know, you were talking about organised groups. But my point still stands that you don't need religion to commit these kinds of acts.

Aren't religious communities more healthy with less crime than the average community? Now this could be because of brainwashing or what-have-you but violence happens when two people disagree on something, this is common nature in human beings and, again, does not require religion.