ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evidence for male bonded coalitionary violence and then addresses what makes people all vulnerable to religious beliefs and how religion hijacks this capacity for violence in men. The terrorists who hijacked the four planes on September 11 were 19 young men, all but one unmarried, bonded together by their faith in Islam and their loyalty to al-Qaeda. The body count of September 11 and human history is the blood-soaked proof. There are at least three levels of evidence that male bonded coalitionary violence has always been with people: the comparative evidence with other species, the palaeontological evidence, and the cross-cultural evidence. At the individual level, religion is the cultural by-product of many different cognitive mechanisms that evolved to promote survival. The idea of subverting families may come as a surprise to those who think of religions as oriented towards family values.
