The idea that I often see espoused that religion causes only strife and if we just got rid of religion, the world would be more peaceful is weird and wrong in a lot of ways, relies on a lot of magical thinking, and fuels the evangelical tendencies of a lot of especially culturally Christian atheists.
Keep in mind, I am a Jewish atheist. I don’t typically identify as an atheist, because my Jewishness is so important to me and because I am fairly observant, and because not believing in G-d does not preclude being a religious Jew as it would say being a religious Christian, but I do not believe in G-d. So I can say this as someone who explicitly rejects a supernatural origin for religion. If you reject that supernatural origin, you have to accept that religion is a human creation and arises out of human needs and desires. And even if you posit that it was made up by sinister figures to control and exploit potential followers, a position I think is laughably naive and completely unrelated to how humans work, then you have to conclude that both those evil puppeteers have non-religious motives, and their followers are getting some kind of psychological need filled. So religion is something people adopt for human reasons.
Violent religious ideologies are also adopted for human reasons that have nothing to do with religion making people crazy or violent. For example, Islamic extremism arises primarily as a response to the effects of colonialism, poverty, and a pervading sense of hopelessness, both in the Middle East and Asia, and in ghettoized immigrant communities in Europe and North America. Although this response is religious in nature, this religiosity is only a veneer over an attempt to fight back and to give their lives a sense of meaning in the face of seemingly insurmountable opposition, and these desires would not disappear or grow less destructive if tomorrow every Islamic extremist were hit with the atheism stick.
Atheistic and secular ideologies have been plenty violent in the past and still are in the present, so we know that any ideology, whether it includes an appeal to divine authority or not, can be used to promote violence or to encourage adherants to respond to percieved threats with violence. Yet to hear some atheists describe it, religion in their minds seems to be a supernatural force that can take over people and make them violent, and if we just conquer this scourge, the world will be at peace. This fairy tale helps explain why many atheists, mostly Western culturally Christian atheists, replicate the Christian need to evangelize. If Christians believe they are keeping the people they are trying to convert from going to hell, these atheists believe that other people’s religiosity brings war and violence to the world and they must convert people to bring peace. Either way, it comes down to the same obnoxious inability to deal with the fact that other people believe differently from you, which strangely enough is the very thing that’s supposed to make religious people so violent and warlike.
White evangelical atheists are just Christians who found a new devil in religion.
L.J.'s Obsessions 