Does religion expose the shortcomings of empathy based moral systems

[henryp]

In the sense that you are speaking of it, i dont think religion is differemt from anything else people have "used" to commit bad deeds. Politics, culture... any ideology or way of thinking can make an already crappy person hold on to it as an excuse to axude power over others.

I'd agree with this.  But the part that's interesting to me, is that religion (assuming their is no God) is what billions of humans look like in a godless world.  

I think intuitively people split it into two.  There's how people behave with God, and how they behave without one.  But we're all the product of the same godless world (in our opinion).  So we (atheists) can't discount the behavior of religious folk as something separate.  The acts that we blame on religion are ultimately to blame on the nature of our godless world.