On the “myth” of religious violence

The reason I call this the “myth” of religious violence – the idea that people … that religion has a peculiar tendency to promote violence – the reason I call that a myth is that all kinds of things cause violence, and I don’t think there’s any way to kind of divide the world up between peculiarly violent religious ideologies and secular ideologies that are somehow less prone to promote violence.

People kill for all sorts of things. They can kill for gods, they can kill for flags, they can kill for oil, they can kill for freedom, they can kill for the workers’ revolution. There are all sorts of things, and so it seems to me that the much more interesting and accurate way of going about it is just examining, kind of on a case-by-case basis, under what circumstances do certain ideologies and institutions promote violence and when they don’t.