When religion sanctions violence ...

Now this is an interesting piece of research. Basically testing the aggressiveness of responses after reading what was taken to be a passage where God sanctions violence.

students were more aggressive (i.e. louder) with their blasts if they had been told that the passage they had previously read was from the bible rather than a scroll. Likewise, participants were more aggressive if they had read the additional verse that depicts God sanctioning violence. At the more secular Vrije Universiteit, the results were surprisingly similar. Although Vrije students were less likely to be influenced by the source of the material, they blasted more aggressively when the passage that they read included the sanctioning of the violence by God. This finding held true even for non-believers, though to a lesser extent.

I guess, we might well have predicted this. What we shoud be wary of is thinking this is a fundamentally religious matter. I think we need to see it (if I may make use of symbolic interactionism for a moment) in terms of the way that legitimations function. I would predict that this kind of response would be seen whenever a group of people we tested where an authority figure appears to legitimise violence in the cause. So Marxists, nationalists etc etc etc ... I suspect that we are looking at something related to the idea that it actually takes quite a bit of training to make an army: we are more naturally disposed to be sociable and co-operative. It takes quite powerful beliefs of whatever kind to motivate killing. Incidently, I rather suspect it has a bearing too on the matter of portrayal of violence on television. The issue is less the portrayal but the portrayal in the ideological context and the 'reader' response to both the portrayal and whether it pushes the salient authority legitimation buttons...
ScienceDaily: When God Sanctions Killing, The People Listen: Filed in: violence, religion, aggression, scripture, legitimacy