[quote=So Boerd]
1. Let me posit an alternate explanation.Raw, unadulterated military predation has been, up until recently, perfectly acceptable. The Romans killed you and took your stuff without any qualm nor issue. Barbarian tribes across Europe quibbled with and slaughtered each other. Genghis Khan. The Persians in Greece, Alexander in Persia and India. The Vikings raided with no aims to spread their faith.Enter Christianity to Europe, whose prime teacher is Jesus Christ and whose Council of Jerusalem nullifies the argument you are indubitably about to make with the OT. Christ preaches nonviolence, and loving thy neighbor. While predation does not end, it now has to resolve the cognitive dissonance certainly in the minds of rulers and soldiers, Christianity's adherents, on the contrast between this predation and their religion. Get the Pope to sanction it, (Crusades and Norman Invasion), claim the guys whose stuff you want is perverting the faith or you have rights to his land, whatever. You had to have SOME form of justification. Rather than SPARK conflict, religion helped neutralize it. 2. So religion is by and large a bulwark against totalitarianism? Glowing endorsemen by Mao and Stalin, that they felt thr religious a threat to their rule.3. Just as saying "There is no God" is Atheistic. If "You die for Christianity!" Is killing for religion, "You die for Communism!" Is killing for Atheism.
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1. So... Religion organized killings and slaughter? That's the argument? :/
Well yes this may have served for the killing to be less random/undiscriminating, it does [i]organize[/i] it. 
Which means better management, resources, larger forces, more concentrated killing grounds.
Sure it may have prevented a few towns by being seized as a result, but at the cost of making killings and murders as a whole far more numerous and brutal.

And once again, I am not arguing that only religion causes violence. I am arguing that religion acts as an enhancer to violence.

2. They felt anything that doesn't go along with what they say as a threat to their rule.

3. Dying for Christianity is dying for Christianity. Dying for Communism is dying for Communism. Dying for atheism is dying for atheism.
Communism is a political system, Atheism is the lack of a religion. These are two different things.