Religion can be a tool used by people to justify things like killing. Historically the people who are manipulated as such are young males. It isn’t really religion that is the problem. It is the malleable nature of people, especially males, of that age. I really wasn’t trying to proclaim religion innocent in regards to violence. I was pointing out that violence occurs even under secular regimes. The problem is the people who would use others in that way.

The antidote to that is education. It is knowledge of the world around you. Technology has in many ways limited the ability of those who would manipulate others. From media to the ability to travel and encounter different kinds of people yourself. I would credit that more for the lack of violence than supposedly secular governments.

You provide key modern examples of relatively short lived horrific atrocities led by (seemingly) other than religious motives…although there are several examples of Hitler’s belief in the devine from a Christian perspective and his anti-Jew campaign is believed in part to have come from this perspective. In Stalin’s case, much of his destruction targeted religions within his country and this underscores my point about The Rule of Law (which includes religious tolerance, but excludes any religion from unduly influencing government). Stalin was anti- all religions and killed people for their beliefs…Mao Tse-Tung and Pol Pot were no different.

The secular laws of most modern nations include tolerance to all faiths and maintains a separation of church and state and they do not in any way equate to strict Communist or Marxist views on eradicating religion. (but if you view atheism as a form of faith as the Communists do, one could argue the Communist motives to destroy other systems of faith to be on par with any of the religious pogroms of the preceding centuries)

Countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran do not hold to such tolerance and religious freedoms and their governments and education systems are founded almost exclusively on Islam. As we continue to witness, the daily violence in the Arabian region stems from religious ideologies that justify the use of violence as an approprate means to an end, rather than embracing Rule of Law principles of mutual respect from a secular perspective.

The difference between the Communists and Islamists is the Communists never embraced the concept of wholesale martyrdom and mutual destruction to further their aims.
Islamists seem willing to destroy themselves if it means killing all those who do not march in lockstep with their religious views (because they believe they will go straight to Paradise for it).

Religion’s role in goverment has for some time been on the decline in favor of secular governments using the Rule of Law and Democracy as the basis for humanity, while upholding these with great advancements in technology and communication.

Any wager there is a direct correlation to the decline of religious influence in government and the decline of violence in the world?

Sadly there remain pariah states and emerging governments with ideological aims completely afield of a sane course for humanity. Especially when religious dogma drives national will…violence is never far and when these states attain the ability to destroy whole cities with a single device, will the world remain less war filled?

If supporters of Islam can ask a single man or woman to strap bombs to their bodies and kill all within a radius of a few meters in the name of their view of God, what will they ask with bombs that can kill everything within several kilometers?

The Islamisation of governments seems poised to emerge as the primary force in new governments across the Middle East. Iran, the leading religious state in the Middle East seems on the verge of attaining nuclear weapons. The mixture seems volatile.

Perhaps Islam’s answers to history’s trend towards civility is not so far away…I guess we will have to wait and see and hold hope that yesterday’s religion drunk governments are not reborn as tomorrows catalysts for WWIII.

The cost benefit analysis thing on security makes a great deal of sense. Think about what happened on 9/11/2001. Men took control of planes with box cutters. They did so only because as a society we were conditioned to give in because situations like that were resolved most peacefully by doing so. 9/11 changed that perception. Box cutters weren’t going to get you control of a plane from that point on no matter what you did in regards to security.