RELIGION TRIES TO AVOID RESPONSIBILITY FOR CAUSING BLOODSHED BY CASTING THE MEMBER WHO KILLS FOR RELIGION TO THE WOLVES

A religion that treats a member who feels inspired by it to kill as a lone wolf and abandons him or her to the mob to look good and unsullied is thereby acting abusively.

Religions despite and even because of having harmful doctrines or potentially disturbing ones - eg telling children their sins were paid for by Jesus' blood - can and will allege that the religious terrorists they have even if they are in the majority are their own responsibility not the faiths or the others in the religion.  It is too easy to say that and there is something worrying about how it is too easy.  You worry that they even say it.

The honest approach is to say that the members have done a terrible thing but that it really does sully and mark us all.  It is not that you are saying you are a terrorist but that you have something to do with what happened by being of his religion.

Saying the terrorists cannot really act in the name of the faith or religion amounts to claiming that the faith or religion is being misused.  But who defines the correct use?  A religion is to blame for it cannot really do anything about that question.  Bad faith or bad religion can be misused for good.  The religion is to blame as a unit for what even a handful of members who are terrorists do.  Saying the religion is being misused for violence is obviously just talk and useless.  Knives are bad in the sense that they can be misused.  Religion can be bad in that sense or in the moral sense or both.  Either way the religion has to admit that it has something to do with it as a whole for it is a whole.  It has to take action and start with cutting the bad nasty revelations of its God out of Bibles and Korans.  If religion is good then good means taking responsibility.  A religion cannot be praised for its good members and not the bad.  Calling them good has to mean admitting they could be bad but were not.  To dispense with responsibility for the bad means demeaning the good members as well.

Numbers are dangerous.  Concentrating on the law abiding members of a religion and dismissing the terrorists as cranks rather than religionists of that religion is saying that what matters is that most are good and that amounts to hinting, "Not that many were killed so it is okay."  You would expect religion to treat the murder of one person as being as heinous as the slaughter of millions.

A religion tries to be a unity but is necessarily divided.  Nothing is a proper unity.  It aspires to be.  Thus a religion has to accept that those who conduct violence in the name of God, out of obedience to a scripture or revelation or in the name of the people are to be considered its own people.  The word religion and the word good do not mean the same thing.  You cannot use the words interchangeably.

Atheists are individualists as in worldview but community members in every other way. A religion is a collective and must be judged as a collective. So “they are not all bad” is not only irrelevant but ignorant.  People outside the religion tell you when terrorists do harm in the name of religion that all the believers cannot be condemned for the terrorism.  But nobody is blaming them all.  All we are saying is that there is a connection between religion and some turning terrorists and the whole religion must take responsibility for that problem.  People inside the religion try to tell you that they are good and the terrorists are bad and disown them.

Take a community that seems to produce some monsters.  "They are not all the same" or "We are not all like that!" is irrelevant if some people in a community or group are committing suicide. What do you do?  You assume anybody can do it even if it seems unlikely.  The suicides say how people must treat and think of the community.  The number is not important.  One is too many. You commit a form of suicide by doing grave harm in the name of faith.  "They are not all the same" or "We are not all like that!" are just political language speaking.  It is simply evil to take that approach for a religion is a unit and part of the unit being bad gives rise to hard questions about the whole unit.

 "They are not all the same" or "We are not all like that!" is irrelevant and mocking the problem for it basically is side-stepping it.  It is a proof that in some way attempts to make religion sacred and immune to condemnation are themselves evil and uncaring.

Back to our religion with its terrorists.  What if it is not an organised community but a community that organises itself – there is a big difference.  A religion that has a hierarchy and a list of beliefs is an organised religion.  A religion like Quakerism has none of that but still behaves in an organised way.  It is not an organised religion.  Is it worse for an organised religion or a religion that is not but which just happens to have order to have religious fanatics and terrorists?

Quote from online comment by Greta Cristiani regarding religion doing harm: "I get angry when believers act as if these offenses aren't important, because "Not all believers act like that. I don't act like that." As if that f*****g  matters. This stuff is a major way that religion plays out in our world, and it makes me furious to hear religious believers try to minimize it because it's not how it happens to play out for them. It's like a white person responding to an African-American describing their experience of racism by saying, "But I'm not a racist." If you're not a racist, then can you shut the hell up for ten seconds and listen to the black people talk? And if you’re not bigoted against atheists and are sympathetic to us, then can you shut the hell up for ten seconds and let us tell you about what the world is like for us, without getting all defensive about how it's not your fault? When did this international conversation about atheism and religious oppression become all about you and your hurt feelings?"  The bigger the harm or potential harm the more important this comment is.

There is a terrorist problem in most religion and some religions have a bigger one than others. The percentage of dedicated terrorists is currently biggest in Islam.

It is said that the Buddhist terrorists who slay Muslims are not Buddhist. But it does not follow that Buddhism is innocent. In fact it takes responsibility and says that as a religion the terrorists will pay for it thorugh the law of karma.

Is it the individual in the religion, not the religion?
 
A study concerning terrorist attacks for which 41 organisations in 21 countries was responsible tells us a lot about how the evil in me is nurtured through the support I feel I am getting from enough people around me. I may feel supported by my culture or feel that if I want to kill people for being of another religion that it does not seriously oppose me. It was found that countries that have very collectivist cultures accounted for 15,036 acts of terrorism. Only 2,090 came from nations that tend to be individualistic. A religion then can generate terrorism by acting as if it does not really care or it may actively encourage the evil.

Religion tends to condone evil retrospectively by being too light on the religious terrorists. Religion's civility is founded on its ability to forgive its evil people and its terrorists too easily. This is nothing more than the disguised and retrospective condoning of their violence. And the religion though smeared in blood seems as fresh as a daisy.

People disagree widely on moral issues. Some think abortion is okay and others think it is the worst form of murder. It stands to reason then that with all that disagreement that man will form religions that do harm. Politicians do not want to admit that any religion is dangerous or would be if practiced properly for it suits themselves. The pope saying all religions want peace is a ridiculous lie. And surely he does not think that the religion of Satanism wants peace?

Islam claims to be the successor of the faiths taught by Moses and Jesus. That is where it gets the idea of killing gays and other sinners from. We must remember that it is not up to you or me or anybody to say what a religion teaches. A member of a religion can be a good person in a vile religion.  A religion stands for what it stands for no matter what its members or anybody else wants to think. The Abrahamic religions are to blame for the killing of "sinners" through ideology and also through letting people kill them. There is a collective responsibility issue.  Denying it only makes members of the religion worse and more disgraceful.

A faith that tries to distance itself from individuals soon starts to do the same with members who do harm as a group.  Then before you know it you have two rival religions shooting each other.