Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on A short distance from the children’s playground.

This is what religion does – fills someone with so much hate that they’ll kill themselves in dreadful ways in order to kill innocent people, just to deprive others of freedom or rights.

It is never the hierarchy that commit suicide, however.

Why can’t the fanatics see that? Why don’t they question? If it really is what god wants, why aren’t the clerics blowing themselves up? “Oh, I’m not worthy to kill myself – I’ll make the sacrifice to stay alive and maintain all this horrible, horrible Earthly power, and let you get all the posthumous glory!” Seriously? Does no one see that, if self-sacrifice were really the ultimate expression of holiness, the people at the top would be clambering over one another to give everything up?

History has shown the following to be true, over and over and over again:

• when you keep most people poor, and desperate, and somehow – against all the evidence – manage to persuade them that the source of the problem isn’t you and your cronies, who are actually the only people trying to help them get to some mythical heaven or promised land;
• when you persuade them that this horrible existence you have imposed on them is the fault of even more poor and desperate people wanting a few rights;
• when you tell them that there is a supernatural entity who wants them, and them alone, to spend eternity in paradise, just as long as you, the intermediary, keep communicating with that entity – and that those people over there are trying to send them to hell…

then you can have wealth, and power, and no-one will threaten your security. Indeed, they will hand over their last possessions and even fight to the death to ensure you keep your wealth and power.

There is a good reason that atheists are the most hated grouping.

It isn’t just the situation with the religious in the near, middle, and far East. Look at the way the American Dream is worshipped in the USA, and the way poor White people are perpetrating violence on other poor people who aren’t as white as them, whilst adoring obscenely wealthy people like Trump. Or the way that the obscenely wealthy politicians in European countries are managing to shift blame for the poverty created by greedy bankers onto migrants and refugees.

Divide and conquer. Divide and conquer.