Is religion the problem?

The recent events in Mumbai have drawn our eyes once again to terrorism perpetrated by religious zealots. For a long time we have heard from the Bill Mahrs of the world that religion causes these terrible acts. Some of the world's worst acts were committed in the name of religion. However to say that these terrible acts of violence would not occur without religion is naive. Right now the Middle East is a hotbed of for "religious violence". Take religion completely out of the equation. Who gets the land? The Arabs/Palestinians or the Jews(as a race of people). For centuries developing countries and regions have fought and killed massive amounts of people for one thing, land. They aren't making any more of it. The European settlers committed genocide on the Native Americans for land. Many of the tribal genocides in Africa are over control of the land.

Genocide is a terrible thing, and many times religion is used as a backdrop or reason for it. However in many developing countries power, wealth, and control of the land is the ultimate goal. How can you claim power over an entire group of people? Tell your group that they are better than the others. There is a classic experiment that shows that they did this with eye color with elementary school students. In one day the students of one eye color had assumed a superiority complex over the other students just because of statements by a teacher. This idea of achieving power and wealth by superiority is what fuel Nazi Germany. It is what kept the conscience clean of American during the African slave trade.

The problem is whether it is religion, race, or stars on the bellies (Dr. Seuss reference) people will always uses their perceived superiority to step on others to gain what they want. Obviously not all horrendous acts are motivated this way. The new Batman movie said it best, "Some men just want to see the world burn". But aside from those that simply desire suffering, religion is just a tool to be misused in order to perpetuate violence. If you remove the tool, those who desire it will pick up another.