The subject here is not so much people who commit violent acts in the name of religion, but rather religious texts themselves and the violent scenes they contain, and which are often committed by the holiest figures.
My perspective is Judeo-Christian (JC), and my argument is that the God of this tradition evokes nothing but love and creation even though certain scenes seem to contradict this example by presenting a God that destroys. My purpose is to address this seeming contradiction, which I think is no contradiction at all.
First we need to accept a certain metaphysical fact, which I think is implicit in the JC tradition, namely that NOTHING STAYS THE SAME, or all is in flux.
In the beginning there isn’t nothing but rather a chaotic deep, a raging flux, which isn’t stilled until God comes on the scene and starts creating. God is the presence that prevents the destructive tendencies of the flux. When God is absent, destruction runs rampant, as was the case at Sodom and Gomorrah, the great flood, and when Jesus died on the cross…
“My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” Jesus died BECAUSE God wasn’t there, BECAUSE the flux wasn’t checked… When God is absent, the flood comes and everything is washed away. When God is present, we are saved from destruction… (IMO the JC God is not an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God… None of these terms are mentioned in the Bible…)
Now here I’ll be the first to say that in the Old Testament the flood is a judgment by God. In other words, God judges that certain people aren’t worthy enough to be saved from the flux and so God releases its destructive power upon them. This is admittedly an older, more barbaric notion of God that is corrected in the teachings of Jesus Christ, where God forgives instead of casting judgment. There is a difference between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus was a rebel against the prevailing religious teachings of his day… To Jesus, God is no longer the one who delivers judgment, but is purely a salvific force, a healing force, a loving force…
Jesus would never release the waters to wash everything away. Rather Jesus would clean the world with unconditional forgiveness.
But anyways, that’s my take on JC religious violence. It isn’t God who destroys, but rather God is the one who holds back destructive forces. In the Old Testament, sometimes God lets these forces free to clean the slate (although it is not Godself who does the violence). In the New Testament even this is corrected by favouring the cleansing waters of forgiveness over the cleansing waters of a flood that washes everything away…