Religious people have forgotten their own morals
because they are accustomed to the ones they get from god

I was looking for a new book to listen to, and I don’t want to go into too much detail, but one was written by a christian scholar (Nigel Biggar, Colonialism. A Moral Reckoning) who more or less was downplaying the harm of wars and imperialism. After some research, I understand that he has an agenda and started with a conclusion instead of looking for one, but what made me write the lines above was that he is a christian who follows the morals of his  (instituted) religion. You have to put in a lot of effort to see, even if it is just a little, the good things in imperialism and suppressing whole groups of people just because they interfere with your way of doing things. I think you can only learn this behavior from the society around you, and what better to use a book for this with the stamp of some higher power on it and supported by a state and institutionalized religion.

Later in the day, I looked on Mastadon, and one of the posts quoted 3 peaceful parts of different religions as if to say that we all have to believe that we should live in peace because it says so in these holy books. I don’t know, but it is pretty easy to quote some terrible lines out of all these same books, so why not forget them if you can use them as an excuse for everything you do, good and bad. 

One should never do something to others that one would regard as an injury to one’s own self. In brief, this is dharma. Anything else is succumbing to desire.— Mahābhārata 13.114.8 (Sanskrit tradition)

Do not do to others what you know has hurt yourself. Kural 316 (Tamil tradition)

Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.  Thales (Ancient Greece)

That nature alone is good which refrains from doing to another whatsoever is not good for itself. Dadisten-I-dinik, 94,5 (Ancient Persia)

When we say that man chooses for himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, pp. 291–292