Do you always need villains for atrocities?  Certainly not!

Religious leaders and religions themselves have caused so much violence in the world.  They are villainous. They do not come across as villains and they take advantage of that.  You don't need your movie villain to do evil.  "Good" people are even better at it.  They like to blame the orders they got for the evil they do.

The danger with commands given by what says it is a sacred source, say God, is that they can suggest or lead to the commanded person feeling they are not the reason some bad action is commanded for it's only what another person wants. An additional curse is how they will tell themselves that if they don't do the bad thing somebody else will. Feeling that you are an agent not an actor or doer makes a massive difference.

Liberals don’t get it that people do obey violent scripture texts and you never know who is going to start doing it. Violent people are always obeying something anyway so why can’t they obey their view of God? God belief is a human thing and has no magic power to guarantee that nobody will do harm with it. Also, if you are religious you may distort your religion or think you do and you are doing that to gear yourself up for committing violent acts in the name of religion. You can argue that you are doing it over the violent texts. The violent texts are still to blame for they are making it possible for you to generate an excuse.  They are to blame for they are making it possible for you to misunderstand and not realise the violent rules are not for you to implement.  Then there is the problem that if you think you are a prophet you can command war in the name of God for all prophets have been controversial anyway.

Religion likes to manipulate people to think that its good deeds compensate for its bad ones.  Nobody is told that the good is human and may not be caused by the faith.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C.S. Lewis

Blooddrinking "holy" villains are not so much the problem as their enablers and fans.  It is seen as kind to give people the benefit of the doubt. But many who do so are in fact lazy more than kind. Sometimes kindness is not their motive at all. Some are just too selfish and want an easy life so much that they will not try to correct the evil opinions of others. They become not necessarily sympathisers with evil but they definitely become emphasisers. And they are on their way to becoming sympathisers. The emphasiser with evil is too lazy to correct the evil person and the sympathiser is as glad they are evil.

Most murders happen in war or in unstable nations.  Most of them are done by good people.  Senseless and unfair wars have been started and fought by people who are considered to be good people.  Caring likeable people who would give you their last penny would still under an evil situation liquidate and torture other people.  They usually have it in for a type of person or religion or group or faction.  They usually need to be commanded to do the evil and they will do it even if they can just say no and walk away.

Psychologists feel decent people will be very harmful to some people when an evil situation makes it possible.  For example, devout Catholics will murder Protestant or Muslim landowners if the latter strongly favour people of their own faith when it comes to feeding and housing them and giving them jobs.

Psychologists feel that evil is not part of the nature or personhood of those people.  They are good people responding to an evil situation by being evil.

If such people take up the meat cleavers and guns far far more will enable and silently approve.  They will not directly harm but they encourage it by their silence or actively encourage it.

Good people can do evil things if they suspend or ignore their ability to make judgements about how to treat some others and let some authority judge for them.  They try to give away their responsibility and lay it on the authority.

They will think and feel that they must obey the authority carefully and well and will not worry about the ethics of the particular or overall situation.

They give up their morality authority over themselves and give it to somebody else for they want to be led into seeing the victims as deserving what they do to them or seeing the hurting of the victims as a sad but necessary evil.  They blame the victims in any case.

Hannah Arendt spoke of the “banality of evil.”  She meant how evil emerges for the most useless reasons such as people just wanting to follow through a command or task.  An authority must really be needed for authority in itself is gorged with risks and dangers.  That is why a religion that is not needed is still evil no matter how harmless it seems.

If evil is banal, it will never satisfy for long which is why it will get worse.  Christians have a similar idea when they say sin is never satisfied.  The trouble is that view requires that you mistrust sinners and battle against them.  It gives Christians away who pretend to love sinners and hate sins.

Intending to be evil leads to fear which is why evil leads to more evil for you feel you need it to protect yourself. It will not help you be happy for long.

Milgram (1965) found that when asking why good people obey and hurt and kill others for they are following orders the answers are "are to this author disturbing."  Speaking of the results of a study he wrote, "They raise the possibility that human nature, or more specifically, the kind of character produced in American democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. If in this study an anonymous experimenter could successfully command adults to subdue a fifty-year-old man, and force on him painful electric shocks against his protests, one can only wonder what government, with its vastly greater authority and prestige, can command of it subjects. There is, of course, the extremely important question of whether malevolent political institutions could or would arise in American society (page 75).”

We have learned that that if we will do evil things to obey human authority how much more will we do them to obey human authority that we think is set up by God or through which God speaks? It explains why Islam and Christianity have spilt blood out of proportion to any other faith. They also have scriptures that glorify God's violent commandments. It shows that if a religion based around God does no harm it could be a different story if it gets the chance and gets people to believe and obey enough. Atrocities were caused by people obeying evil authorities but an evil authority that commands you what to believe is more potent. Only religion tells people what to think and can get away with it. A human authority telling you what to think makes you feel inside, "This is ridiculous, he might be wrong and who does he think he is? I cannot help what I think most of the time." But we do tend to think that God and his authorities legitimately can tell us what to think.

It is scary how easy kindly grannies can become celebrators of evil and cut heads off when the situation makes the conditions right.  It is scary how faith in religion and God potentially create such situations when there are already too many situations.  It is scary how good people are to be feared more than villains crouching around in the dark.

Sadly, religions that preach violent scriptures or require you to celebrate the violence of the past are given a free pass in society.  At the very least the state should be trying to provide education so that people will disentangle themselves from such religions and disentangle them from society.  The reason behind such laziness could be down to a failure to understand that people do and can and might obey violent commands from their God.  Liberals who are disobedient to religion never realise that people might obey it to the letter even if that means attacking religious rivals and liquidating them.

If a Christian wants to kill you he can find justification say if you are a politician. He does not need a lot of justification – just enough. It does not look that bad if you want to kill somebody to find a reason to justify it.  The beauty of blaming somebody else for ordering you to kill is that you say they have the justification not you.