That’s about what we have with religion.

Stephen P: “It was this polarisation that made it possible for Protestants to discriminate against Catholics in matters of housing and employment, and it was religious bigotry that encouraged them to do so. And it was this maltreatment that led to the troubles.”

Which Troubles are you talking about? The Irish War of Independence? That was basically British versus Irish. If you are talking about the Troubles after the War of Independence, that had to do with hardliners not being satisfied with the compromise that left Northern Ireland part of Britain.

I don’t think anyone here is saying religion hasn’t been, and isn’t still, a cause of evil. It’s just that so often evil men do evil things for other reasons and then invoke religion as an excuse. Read through Mein Kampf and note all the instances of Hitler using Christianity to justify his designs. Yet, I’m not convinced he had any real religious faith at all.

In the case of the KKK, is it really religion that causes them to do their evil or is it likelier that they just don’t like non-whites and religion is a convenient rallying point? Hating people for the sake of hating them is hard to defend, but religion can imbue the cause with a faux righteousness.

No, I’m not trying to get religion off the hook. It has been the cause of much evil. But people can be evil with or without it. What’s hard is to get others to participate in that evil. Religion often works quite nicely as a tool toward that end.

If someone kills someone and claims it was because of their skin color, would you think skin color was an excuse or a cause of the violence? (Maybe not THE cause, or not the ONLY cause, nor even the primary cause, but at least A cause of violence.) How is it different if someone kills over religion? Why might we see racism as a “cause” in one, but religion as an “excuse” in the other? What if their religion is promoting racism? Would it be a “cause” then? Or would it be an “excuse”? Was the KKK just using race as an “excuse” when they lynched black people back in the day? An excuse for what?

What about violence regarding sexuality? Ethnicity? Favorite sports teams? Political affiliation? What criteria are you using to distinguish a “cause” of violence from an “excuse” for violence? People commit violence over lots of things, and usually people see no problem with seeing these things as causes—but somehow when violence is committed for religious reasons people refuse to use the word “cause”, and call it an “excuse”.

I’m not saying religion always causes violence, nor that there would be no violence without religion, nor that all religious people are violent. I don’t believe any of those things are true. But I do believe religion CAN cause violence, and I see all this talk about “It’s not a cause, it’s just an excuse” as pure spin, intended to promote undeserved deference. And it’s dangerous deference. If we refuse to recognize the causes of violence, we have little hope of making any progress against violence.

However, it is one of the traditional pretexts for violence. It’s not the only one, but it’s almost always part of the justification for violence between two large groups.

So, you can’t blame what’s going on in Nigeria entirely on religion, but do you have to do that? I think the extent to which religion is responsible, even if it’s not the only cause, is quite enough to condemn it. Concede, then, that it’s not just about religion, but that it is also about religion and any time reasons for war are reduced is a good thing. No religion would be taking away one more reason for people to kill each other, and while they’d probably find other reasons to do it sometimes, sometimes they wouldn’t.