Violence isn't a byproduct of religion, it's a sad component of human nature.
Violence is often a byproduct of religious beliefs, though. It
is often enabled and potentialized by unwise or mishandled religious beliefs, and that is as unpleasant as important to realize.
Religion is defined and understood very differently indeed, but most understandings involve it having a major role in deciding where one's values lie and which goals are seem as most important. An unavoidable result is that if it is not well-chosen and well-understood one is more likely than not to commit serious mistakes. Which in turn may be one reason why so often people conclude that it is safer to, noticeably enough,
submit themselves to some authority's judgement on those matters.
Unfortunately, that is also a very popular attitude. I figure it is appealing and looks safe and confortable to many people. And right there I must be quite the unpleasant gent, because I see that as cowardly and irresponsible. To me that is cheating and attempting to avoid responsibilities that do need to be accepted by each individual person.
Religion gave/gives violent groups in the world a scapegoat, is all.
I wish. It also gives many of those people and groups
certainty and justification that they never earned, never deserved, and often never will.
Even if you believe your 'holy book' is dictating for you to commit heinous acts of violence, that doesn't mean you should. At some point, people should view the stories of centuries past as taken in the time period they were told, and use their own set of morals and values to determine their courses of action.
Quite so. Unfortunately, an alarming number of people does the exact opposite, to the point of proposing that religion's legitimate role
is the exact opposite: to teach us The One True Way of the Ancients Which We All Should Be Ashamed of Not Wanting to Emulate Right Here and Now Even and Perhaps Mainly If It Makes No Discernible Sense and Sounds Absurd To Any Reasonable Person.
And quite often, they insist that we must do that Because God Told Us To. And either disregard entirely or spend a lot of effort attempting to disqualify any competing understandings, often for no discernible practical result. Such a bad waste of good human efforts.
I guess those people made me an Anti-Thiest. So... Thank You All, wherever you are, and I hope from my heart that you learn better before we all suffer even more for it.
The message of Islam is one of hope and peace, but it is a religion filled with strife and struggle, and the message gets lost in that, and all people take away from it is...the strife and struggle.
The message of any religion is that which its adherents attribute to it. It is hopeless to expect it to be homogeneous even in the same family of nominal adherents to the same faith, let alone along a faith that is nominally the belief of over a billion people.
To a large extent, it is
because there is so much relutance in accepting that heterogeneity of interpretation and meaning, because it is perceived as so crucial that agreement be attained, that all that strife and struggle arise. So I do not know that I see a lot of wrongness in perceiving them as significant.
