How do you know that same evil wouldn’t be done without religion? Hate and evil finds justification for itself wherever it can. Often it is religion but it can also be in culture, tradition, racism, otherness etc. I’m not convinced a lack of religion would correspond to a net reduction in that kind of evil. It might just shift somewhere else as humans try to justify their terrible actions.
This is likely true for the large scale evils, where religion is used to coerce people into terrible acts. It's less clear for smaller evils that religion is to blame for. Having a discussion on the ethics of something like homosexuality becomes much harder when a significant portion of crowd thinks a vengeful god has forbidden it.
Further, I find the long running system of a tithe to be rather evil, and can't see an equivalent without religion. A tax for the general well being of your afterlife is rather unique.
That doesn’t make sense to me - rationalizing your actions is a very necessary coping skill for living every day life. You have to make sub optimal decisions at times and you need a way to move on. That a person can rationalize evil decisions is unfortunate, but it doesn’t take away the necessity of it.
The point is that religion taught them to hate in the first place.
There is an incredible amount of hatred and discrimination in this world that can be traced back to the text in some book said that some particular group of people were bad and other people accepted that as the word of God. The only reason these people have to hate that group is because an authority figure (the authority figure) told them to.
