Full comment is le epic atheist pwnage.
"Exactly; treating religious-inspired actions as some kind of psychopathy or anomaly only serves to gloss over the scale, depth, and pervasiveness of the problem.
These people aren't freak accidents or weird monsters -- they're normal human beings who had no natural defenses against religious arguments, so they went "full religion."
Religion is an opportunistic meme, it gets its claws in where it can, and most people think it's normal, so they don't defend themselves against it at all. Their natural defenses are their own connections to secular values, regular civic and family life, and their everyday non-religious social expectations.
It's like the common cold -- it's a common nuisance that becomes extremely dangerous when your natural defenses are weakened, by bullying, isolation, changes in lifestyle (like going to college, moving to a new town, new marriage, etc), or social/family problems. That's when the infection becomes a full-blown crisis.
It's no accident that ISIS moves people around, that religious groups isolate you from non-religious people (a "retreat" or a "mission" .. or a "pilgrimage") and often from your friends and family, and break your natural ties to community and your personal values.
Religion is like a virus, and participating in, or giving money to, or not being critical of, the moderate strains of it are the same as refusing to wash your hands (or let your kids get vaccines) because your immune system can "handle" it, or you think it's "healthy."
Just because you won't actually die from this stupidity doesn't make it OK not to cover your cough. Someone is going to catch this disease and they're going to suffer, and they're going to spread their misery. It's ALL bad, even the parts that aren't killing anyone, because it keeps the disease strong in the community." Now at [+145]
"The good things about humanity still exist without religion. The bad things about humanity are only amplified by the bad parts of religion.
Sometimes giving people a shitty model of the universe perverts their good impulses into bad outcomes. The people who did this think they are doing good. Without religion there would still be misguided people and misguided ideas about the universe, but those ideas can be confronted with logic and argued against. Religion tells you that certain things can't be questioned.
Ten percent of people will always be shit bags, but when you take people in desperate circumstances and feed them on ignorance and superstition terrible things happen. Yes, obviously people can be religious and be good. But I suspect the religious people you know ignore an awful lot of their religious history and doctrine in order to behave morally."
Nice, because people want to take their cues about behavior from those who look down on people for their culture and belief system. Sure.