There are clearly bad behaviours that are created by religion
No. There are bad behaviors created by religious PEOPLE in pursuit of some agenda or another. Religion does not create behaviors, PEOPLE do.
There are also bad religious ideas, either created by or perpetuated by people, that were constructed in a religious context, carry more credibility in the minds of religious people than they ever really should have. This is a form of information filtering and selection bias that is, in my opinion, far more problematic than prejudice or extremism: it is not all that difficult to confront a religious person's prejudices or steer him in the direction of more moderate responses to his day to day problems, but religious-based information bias is a subtle distortion of a person's ability to evaluate truth in ways that it is hard to clearly demonstrate.
"We should murder homosexuals in the streets" is not something the majority of religious believers would agree with, even in most Muslim countries. "Homosexuality is unnatural," not so much. The former is making a definite value judgement on the sanctity of human life and creating a moral dilemma that demands a solution. The latter is just a rhetorical device that doesn't require any solution at all; you can slap it on a bumper sticker or throw it on a youtube comment and never once give any thought to how nonsensical that sentiment actually is.
Religion -- specifically, organized religion -- caters to
stupidity and encourages the abandonment of critical thinking in favor of a universal appeal to authority fallacy. This is one of the reasons why very intelligent religious people find organized religion to be frustrating and counter-productive. But to be absolutely clear on this: This is one of the main problems with ORGANIZED religion, which manifests in very different ways from private religious beliefs, undefined spirituality or even (to some extent) uncanonized folk religion. Organized religion provides a lot of easy answers and is therefore conducive to sloppy thinking.
The claim here was that religion never causes bigotry etc.
Nope. The claim is that religion doesn't
cause specific types of beliefs to exist. PEOPLE do that, because human thought cannot actually be generated by anyone but human beings. Furthermore, religion ALONE isn't sufficient to increase the risk factors for "bigotry etc." In EVERY case where social dysfunction is well pronounced, it is also accompanied by widespread poverty, political corruption, (sometimes) the prevalence of substance abuse, an ineffectiveness of stabilizing institutions such as law enforcement or education, or some combination of the above.
Which is just a verbose way of saying "Poor people believe a lot of dumb shit." To the extent that poor people lean more heavily on organized religion for comfort and social connection (again, lack of stabilizing institutions otherwise), they also tend to have dumb religious beliefs. THAT can certainly perpetuated itself if that particular society remains isolated long enough and those dumb beliefs somehow wind up canonized into scripture, in which case you now have a new dumbass bible verse to quote out of context 300 years from now when someone decides that space exploration is offensive to God or something.
But poor people being prejudiced and/or bigoted against people they don't like and don't understand? That is NOT a feature you can blame on religion, organized or not. That's just human nature: when faced with competitive pressure over resources, people will draw battle lines around whatever little clique/group/clan/tribe they imagine themselves to be part of and will try to exclude others over whatever arbitrary criteria seems to make sense at the moment. In this sense, laughing dog is 100% correct: if you remove religion from the equation, they'll just find something ELSE to fight about.
Because at the end of the day, they're not actually fighting for any coherent reason. It's all about emotions, insecurity, instinct and fear. Eliminating religion will not remove those core causes of those social conflicts, because the religious justifications for the conflict are just self-serving rationalizations after the fact.
If you believe that then you shouldn't be saying there is no correlation.
I didn't say there was no correlation. I said that religion, bigotry and violence are all strongly correlated with the
presence of human beings.
But I also note that the combination of "religion" and "people" isn't sufficient to create those conditions either. Some other factors must also be present for that combination to turn toxic (see above).
