Is Violence Inherent to Any Religion?

Is religion good or bad? This sound bite of a question dominates much of what passes for public discussion of religion in the United States. When the soi-disant New Atheists took the bestseller lists by storm in the first decade of the new millennium with titles like The End of Faith (2004), The God Delusion (2006), Breaking the Spell (2006), and God Is Not Great (2007), it was because they focused almost exclusively on the capacity of religion to generate violence. This wasnâ??t surprising, considering that since 9/11 we have lived in a world newly conscious of the geopolitical power of piety. Defenders of faith have of necessity adopted the same focus, albeit to opposite ends. â??The idea that religion has a tendency to promote violence is part of the conventional wisdom of Western societies,â? writes William Cavanaugh in his revealingly titled The Myth of Religious Violence (2009). Karen Armstrong sharpens the point in the opening paragraph of Fields of Blood, her new inquiry into the relationship between religion and violence: â??Modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.â?