I will concede that throughout history humans have killed in the name of their flags as long as Dostoevsky can concede that a good amount of people have killed in the name of religion. While sure civilization leads to the whole idea of expansion and imperialism, I would argue that the insane patriotism that we've seen with religion likely leads to a more heinous level of violence, but of course no one can say religion has caused more violence than civilization itself. I should amend my statement: I believe religion allows for a greater capacity to commit atrocities than civilization warfare. When you fight a war for land or power of your country, yes people are given licence to be as violent and terrible as they wish but I believe that in order to do shit like what the crusaders or the Vietcong did you first have to be convinced that your victims deserve it. I feel compelled to mention the alternative of picking up psychological tendencies and behaviors beyond most human capacities, and for an example I point to Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" where we have the sick and twisted Mr. Blonde whose behavior is seen as insane by those around him, showing that it is beyond what the normal human is capable of, but it is these sorts of tendencies that can be formed in the right situations. It is that level of torture and sadism that we see during the Vietnam War, and I would argue that the Vietcong were not all sick twisted fucks like Mr. Blonde, but rather they thought the westerners they had captured to deserve it because of what had been done to their people and their country. There is a personal-ish vendetta there- a sort of revenge motivation that drove these people to torture the captured soldiers in the way that they did- they actually believed they deserved it. Now some of us might argue that it is obvious that those soldiers should not be punished for something they were not responsible for, but I think that the idea of individual responsibility in the way it is being applied there is more of a western idea, eastern cultures tend to emphasize the group as one entity and shit like that, I'm not really gonna get into it because it's not that relevant and this is way longer than it needs to be already, but I needed to mention that in order to take that bit of doubt out of my argument.
Jumping back to the main argument, during the crusades we hear of some pretty messed up shit being done to people, and we can attribute this to the idea of the "infidel". Christians genuinely 100% thought that all other religions were inferior and it was their duty to either convert them or kill them, and depending on which Crusade we're talking about here we see a good amount of this from the Muslims and Jews as well (the Jews the least, though). A lot of the medieval torture devices in all those museums are actually just from the Crusades, so religion brought people to justify doing some pretty fucked up shit to other people.
I would argue that human curiosity manifests itself into a desire to destroy and (if permitted) a sort of sadism. It is just a question of allowing people to justify doing horrible things, I could easily have used the Nazis up and down this post but I feel like that's so overused it would be ineffective, but regardless you can totally just think of the Nazis to prove this idea. For some of them, their actions were justified by the idea of the state, for some by the idea of religion, for some by science, and for some it was a sick twisted pleasure. I tend to believe that our internal desires for violence are the results of repressed "animal" nature, and that humans (like animals) need to see a bit of violence to satisfy our animal brains, and perhaps that would account for this desire that comes out when coerced. Then again, I'm sleep deprived and really don't have any scientific evidence to back my claim, it's kind of just this idea. But yeah, that's my two cents on a discussion I wasn't there for.
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