Many people say it is not religion’s fault that it is so violent. Just bad people using religion for evil, and there are bad people who would do evil things with or without religion. However, I find that it is religion’s fault because it is in the texts themselves acts of violence and evil. People aren’t getting this from nowhere, they’re getting it form the Bible itself.
I not only see many problems (that I expand on in a previous post) with the story of Noah’s Ark from the Old Testament, but also a quote from the New Testament about Jesus in Matthew 10:32-39.
There are also a few more example of violence in the Old/New Testament, such as God’s request for Abraham to sacrifice his son, God being rather cruel to Job, a rape victim being forced into marrying her rapist, the fact that Hell exists and an all-powerful or at least quite powerful and benevolent God doing nothing about this, and the permission to own slaves even with specific rules on how to mark them. Those are just a few off the top of my head.
Actually, there is quite the list of violent acts in the Bible. And, before you make this point, one cannot simply add a separate list of the good God had done to justify the bad He had done. If God is aware of evil and chooses not to fix it, He himself is evil. If God is unaware of all these evil acts, he is impotent and not worthy of any praise.
If I may also add, violence is not the only problem I have with the Bible. The texts also include several incorrect facts (false claims about insects, the value of pi, and the age of the earth), advocate against knowledge (the story of adam and eve where God cautioned them against eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge), maintain the idea that women are inferior and should be treated as such (1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34), are hateful towards any other opposing views (Matthew 10:32-33), create shameful guilt for thousands of people even today because they say non-procreational sex is a sin (Genesis 38:9) and that women must remain virgins until marriage (Hebrews 13:4 and Deuteronomy 22:13-21), and, worst of all, are not at all backed by evidence!
