I think that religion reflects all the aspects of human nature, including the bad, because it was made by humans. In the Bible, God seems schizophrenic in that he can seem all-loving one moment and then wrathful the next. The Greeks dealt with this by creating many Gods to reflect the many different possibilities, while more modern religions attribute them all to one entity. I consider God’s flooding of the Earth and His wiping out Sodom and Gomorrah to show religion’s dark side, irrespective of politics. There is plenty of vengeance and wrath in religious texts because that reflects part of who we are. If a person believes in a wrathful idea they will be able to find a religious passage to justify it, and those ideas exist in religion regardless of politicians.

Religion can be used in politics to make people do good things also. MLK and Ghandi were political and their ideas were based in religion. All major religions speak of love and charity. Religions are just always going to be a mixed bag since they are created by fallible humans and used by fallible humans.

Beyond that, the dark side of religion is created from the mere fact that people believe that it is the absolute truth, and not just man made. Religious texts were written to reflect the biases of the author’s culture, and an unwillingness to permit change allows people to hang on to bad ideas. Slavery was fine in God’s eyes because it was socially accepted at the time in the author’s culture. The same goes for the disparagement of homosexuality. Pork was seen as a forbidden food because it could go bad when not kept cold, and could kill you. The fact that people believe these things to be the actual word of God creates a dark side to religion because people are then unwilling to accept better ideas. In situations like these I think that religion can tilt the balance towards the bad since the person may have held a better view if the religious passage did not exist.

Aside from the parts of religious texts that address very factually specific situations like those, I agree that religion will be used merely as a vehicle for humans to pursue good and bad means, regardless of politicians. This is no surprise since religious texts are only a mirror of human nature as a whole.

History bears out the fact that atrocities, in the name of religion, have happened as a result of man essentially being taken over…
If you take out the “,in the name of religion,� that sentence is just as accurate.

How about the Crusades and the Iconclast Age? I wasn’t referring to all atrocitites, rather those that were done as a misguided response to fulfilling a religious driven vision.

I’m not a christian but it’s astounding how many academics are attempting to scientifically explain why all of those poor, undereducated fools choose to believe in a God.

I tend to think religion was first “invented” by early man as a coping mechanism, in order to reconcile self-awareness with the awareness of one’s own mortality by positing the ideas of God, the soul and eternity. Over the years, as humans discovered how best to get along and even cooperate with other self-aware humans, they married that knowledge (let’s call it “morality”) with their spiritual awareness to form a system of belief that encompassed the entire human condition as it was understood at the time - in other words, a religion.

I also tend to think that religion did not take on its “dark side” until humans also invented politics, and discovered that great power could be had in this life by politicizing the prevailing religion.