When people unfortunately use religion to facilitate their envy, arrogance and hate, communalism surfaces.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good... There is something about the tenor of relationships within a religious community that makes it the best tutorial in citizenship and good neighborliness.
All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.
Religion can make it worse. Are you supposing that if people were encouraged to believe in a transcendent reality, and to be encouraged by grand rituals and music and preaching, to love their neighbors, then they would put jealousy and frustration aside?
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.
Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.
Religion is often just tribalism: pride in a group one was born into, a group that is often believed to have 'God' on its side.
Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God.