Something I learned from Pope and people's reactions

It baffles me how this simple notion escapes so many people nowadays. Religion is a creed, an ideology like the countless ideologies that have existed and exist at the present time. There's nothing exclusive to religion that would render it more capable of inciting violence and inspiring others to wage bloody wars of mass murder and ravaging. An infinite number of wars have been instigated and many a genocide have been carried out in the name of whatever that you can momentarily think of, yet religion gets the flak, the lion share of it at least.

Personally I believe that the explanation of this phenomenon is twofold. First is the fact that its the nature of religion, the prevalent and historically relevant ones at least, to entail and attempt to impose what are currently regarded as antiquated notions of virtue. In other words, religion is perceived as standing in the way of licentiousness, incontinence, intemperance, lewdness, indolence and many other wonderful things of modern civilization. Second, it has to do with the fact that right now western civilization is largely the hegemon civilization with the claim for supremacy. At any specific epoch its always the hegemon of that epoch that dictates the opinion of what is terrible and what is not. The larger part of western civilization seems to have had a traumatic and fairly recent experience with religion and therefore its the source of the larger part of discourse and conflict that has to do with religion; it is its origin. If in some alternate reality the USSR won the cold war and was currently the hegemon of the present epoch of that alternate reality, you'd find out that the most rebuked and ostracized notion would be "private property".

Actually there is one thing that separates religion from all other forces and it has nothing to do virtue or hegemony. And the inverse of that attribute is an essential pillar of modern liberal democracy.