[gitarr]

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." --Steven Weinberg, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

[rosser]

That's very pithy, but it's patently false. It doesn't take religion to make "good" people do "bad" things. It just takes an authority figure.

[CamperBob2]

It doesn't take religion to make "good" people do "bad" things. It just takes an authority figure.

Exactly (see my other comment in response to yours).

If you're a wannabe authority figure with grand ambitions but no sound arguments, what's your next step? You either invent a God, claim the favor of an existing one, or (in the case of the Communist personality cultists) become one yourself.

When someone like me says that they "hate religion", what we are really saying is that we hate this process, and wish it would stop working so well.