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The Holocaust wasn't a religious genocide- it was a wide spread eugenics program. It was genocide, but it was really more a race-based genocide. Jews were treated as a race, not a religion- and it wasn't from my understanding of it religious motivated.
I'll give you the inquisition as being close to a genocide tough not really quite fitting the definition.
The Salem Witch Hysteria had a total body count of 20 something people, that's not a genocide.
Darfur is about land use with other elements as a proxy and excuse to kill eachother

And you could take the major communist states as examples of atheist genocide-scale killings.

It was very much religious based. Hitler wrote that he believed he was doing god's work by ridding the world of jews and other types he considered wrong, and the SS all wore beltbuckles with Gott in Himmel (IIRC) on them.



The Inquisition is more about torture than death- and torture of the sort the employed is just as bad- but the whole motivation was entirely religious, making it a good example of religion gone bad, just like the various crusades.



Salem had a body count under 100, but it was hardly the biggest or meanest of the witch hysterias out there. Merely the most ludicrous, as it was really about a community going utterly paranoid/ backstabbing and accusing each other. Other witch hunts throughout time have a much higher total body count.
Interestingly enough, Joan of Arc, who claimed she was doing the will of the same god that protestants and catholics both worship, was burned at the stake for being a witch. Of course, the catholics and the protestants have never had problems stabbing each other, using religion as a veil, if not their outright motivation.



No. No you could not. Because those killings were done in the name of the cult of personality of the state, and not motivated by a lack of belief. You're really hard pressed to find someone killing in the name of a lack of belief or tenents. I'm sure you could find one, but he or she'd be literally an order of magnitude harder to find than the religious types willing to kill in the name of religion.

Religion is beneficial for those who need a God figure and a straight set of rules to function properly in society. It also encourages all forms of art.

(And then we have fanaticism and destroying art (Henry VIII) and all kinds of stuff that makes me wonder if it's worth it.)

Apparently your not human, because to be human is to be subjective, and to be subjective is to be biased.

Therefore your opinion is essentially meaningless.

Religion is a nice little form of social control, I agree with you on that. I'm an atheist and I think religion is a not necessarily a bad thing, nor really a great thing. Morality can most certainly exist without religion. However, I believe that the need for religion to establish some form of control over the people is decreasing. More people are challenging religion and what role it plays in our daily lives. Part of that can be thanks to science, however science can not explain all. We don't need religion to keep people from going crazy because of the unknown anymore.

Religion has also cost a lot of lives too. Holy wars, salem witch trials and throughout the Crusades, and many other times. I don't think we can really tell if the world would be better off or not without religion.