BOTTOM LINE: RELIGIOUS COMMITMENT IS THE BABY STEP TO VIOLENCE

BOTTOM LINE

If you are in a religion there is political and social baggage that you take on whether you want it or not. That entails a link to violence. If you are not violent, you are not responsible for what a co-religionist terrorist does in the name of the religion but you are responsible for being the sea for that fish to swim in.  That you need an atheist to secularist to tell you that for a religionist will not says it all.

RELIGION SERVES ONLY FOR VIOLENCE

The good we do is natural.  Thus even if it is done in the name of a religion it is not religious.  Religion must be assessed on how true it seems to be and how much harm happens.

ANALYSIS OF THE DARK SIDE

A religion comes and peace is destroyed. It says it is good and not to blame. You need to be able to prove that the faith or religious drive is not to blame for what its terrorists do in its name. You cannot prove that. People have rights - ideas and religious ideas do not so it is inherently very unfair to blame people and leave the beliefs or religious system out of it. To say that something else will be persecuting and killing if you don't have the religion to do it is really saying we should put up with the religion for better the devil you know. It is either saying that human nature is bad and will find something else. To say that another bad religion will come. So it is an inherently sectarian argument. It is a terrible thing that a human person as a person has to be blamed like that rather than the religious human person. It amounts to saying that human nature is dangerous but religion is not. The argument backfires for it says that man-made religion then must be bad!
Honouring a Bible with violence that you see as man-made though it says it is God's word is vile.

 That is deliberately condoning man preaching violence for God. Only God has the right to write a scripture and one that has nasty commands should be rejected. Cherry-picking the good bits from scriptures that contain tolerance or endorsements of violence is just making them look good though they have the violence in. It's ingrained in the book once it is written in. To honour the book is denying that the violence is disgusting and intolerable. It is a thin argument against violence that depends on you being selective. Politicians do that all the time - they cherry pick the life story of the terrorist and make him or her a hero. You are cherry picking non-violent statements and ignoring the violent so you are making the ban on violence depend on you and what you say. It is not you. You did not write the scripture. Who do you think you are? Don't you know that evil religions and evil scriptures need to do a lot of good in order to be effective at doing the evil? Nothing can afford to be totally and too obviously bad.

To say, “Violence happens in everything anyway,” when you see your religion engaging in violence please realise that you are admitting you should not make such a fuss about religion and should not be taking it seriously enough to give it your children or cooperate with your community and schools pressuring children to join it and stay in it.  Religion even if it could be  good cannot be good if it requires such interference.