Are you for or against the separation of church and state?

[Ryantology]

I do love the double standard you've got going on here, though: I point out that violent and dark christian cultures exist and you immediately leap to tell me it wasn't because of christianity, but evil men. You then quickly turn around and blame nonbelief for anything bad done in secular societies. So systems of belief aren't responsible for evil actions, but only if it's the one you subscribe to? Is that really where you're going here?

It's not even a good double-standard. Religions can, and very frequently do, inspire people to do terrible things. A nation which is heavily influenced by a religion has a significant chance of having its policies influenced in negative ways by that religion. One need only look at the United States to find countless examples of discriminatory and persecutory legislation which comes from Christian influence. This does not necessarily mean a religious nation will definitely adopt harsh and arbitrarily punitive laws based upon whatever myths it believes, but it often is the case.

Contrast that with strict secularism. Even if we count regimes such as Nazi Germany, the early USSR and the DRPK, those nations all had the equivalent of state religions in which one worships a single masculine figurehead which is murderous, capricious and probably insane. Other than the rituals, and the fictional nature of God, what is the practical difference between those nations and a theocracy? It is barely accurate to call them secular, but let's assume they are for the sake of argument.

Do we compare body counts? It's true that the 'secular' totalitarian nations killed a lot of people, but really, does anyone think, for a second, that the Catholic Church, or the Christian kingdoms and empires would not have seeded Christendom with Auschwitzes and gulags for its first 12 centuries after Constantine if they had the means and technology to do so? It is not as if the Church can really condemn Hitler's "let's kill all the Jews" idea, unless it's because he was more successful in 12 years than they were in 1,200. Hitler and Stalin were no more evil or bloodthirsty than some Popes or other church figures, they were just a lot better equipped, that's all. A person who murders with a baseball bat is just as awful as a person who murders with a machine gun, the number of victims doesn't change that.

A state which is truly secular, in that it has no real or de facto state religion and no real equivalent like totalitarian leader cults and ideological dogma, how many such examples can you find which are guilty of mass atrocities? If you look at such nations today, few of them as there are, how many of them are poor, crime-ridden, starving or backwards?