Deadliest religion ever?

[Regina]

It's extremely bloody obvious what "No one was ever 'stoned to death' by an atheist." is getting at.

No it's not.


People do bad things. "People". Anger and obsessive psychological tunnels that human brains create, have nothing to do with religion. When people go angry and beat the shit out of somebody, it's because they got angry. A drug can stop that anger and this is what hospitals do.

They don't give you an injection that make you an atheist, they give you an injection that silences the anger. 
Stoning to death is killing. Just like butchering a girlfriend because she likes somebody else, people who stone wives to death are just jealous, angry people who can't control their anger.

If they weren't Christian or Muslim, they will kill with another method.


Being a sick freak has everything to do with not being able to control your emotions. The brain will just find an excuse; Sunni religion, Shiite religion, Christian religion, Jewish religion, all are excuses, a killer is a killer.

To some extent I see your point, but I think religion exacerbates a violence problem in individuals.

*before religion* -

- Some people just have violent dispositions and might act on it and even kill in heated moments of anger, but probably even they wouldn't go as far as torture and extreme brutality in it
- Some men view women as second class and believe their role is in the kitchen
- Some people might be ignorant (not necessarily hateful) of homosexuality and thus might be uncomfortable with it
- People do inherently have some degree of tribalism, where they gravitate towards others who are similar in some way

Most rational people can come up with logical arguments against the above and overcome these things.

*Introduce religion* - You now have a divine justification to act on all your beliefs, and to not hear reason because "God says...". If we're assuming that we're talking about theocratic surroundings where logical discussion is branded as "blasphemy", the following can become reality very fast;

- The violent now have an excuse, and given the prescribed punishments by the religious doctrine they might come up with more elaborate gory ways to kill
- Men now have a divine mandate to own their wives, to beat them and to view them as baby-making machines, because "it's God's design for men and women"
- Ignorance of homosexuality turns into "God says this is unnatural"... and you must be put to death to stop it spreading (again often manifesting in gory brutal deaths)
- What might have been some distrust and reluctance to mix with people of other tribes before now becomes "you're a heretic and you insult my God... death to you too".

So while I'm not saying that humans are incapable of evil without religion, what religion does is take the base elements of ignorance and violent tendencies in some peoples' minds, amplify them 10-fold and give pseudo-"rational" justifications... with disasterous results.