I believe it is religion. Through religion, humans commit unspeakable atrocities all over the world. In no particular order of how horrifying or not: Murder, genital mutilation, forced marriages, marital rape, shunning by family and friends, removal of civil rights, punitive child-rearing, flogging, forced childbirth, hiding one’s face, hiding one’s hair, hiding one’s body, inflicted shame and distress around sexuality and sexual freedom.....you get the gist.

Greed sucks, And even though humans are greedy to an extent by nature, enough people are levelheaded enough to not allow their own greed to interfere with the lives of other humans. Of course, I have not done or read any studies, but I would bet a year of my salary that greed alone has not caused a minute fraction of damage in our world that religion has.

GOOD QUESTION!!

There are no easy answers but some ponderings:

Given that "greed" is one of the "seven deadly sins" did we actually have the concept before religion? Thus, did religion define greed? Thus, wouldn't this mean that religion precedes greed and if we are determining which is worst by how much damage has been inflicted, wouldn't it be religion?

Now, if we go on the theme of religion, until sometime in the 19th Century, I'd say religion, hands down since we have had Crusades and other religious based attacks/wars for time immemorial prior to that point. At or after the 19th century, Oligarchs figured out how to make a profit (such as Winchester) from war and somewhere in the 19th/20th Century they further figured out how to infiltrate politics and get countries to... well, war, with one another and the "iron mongers" sold weapons to any side that will buy.

We could have a long and fruitful discussion as to which eras were worse in terms of damage done in the name of greed/religion and I am only considering war here. Sadly, WWII was rather devastating, as were the American Civil War, Rwanda, Vietnam, etc, in terms of lives lost. That said, each of the Crusades and the reactions of the Muslim communities were also very costly in lives. However, Iron Mongers of the pre 19th Century eras were not as organized. While they made a profit, they had no real push in causing a crusade, they just profited from each one (or... is it a Fatwah?... in the Muslim retaliatory case... and note, there is not enough, clear history, that I know of, to say WHICH came first).

The long and short is that I could argue that the pre 19th Century eras were roughly equal to the 19th/20th and beyond eras of destruction. The previous eras being mostly religious based while the modern problems are... well, based on greed or political gain (which we can say is another form of greed).

ALL of THAT said... what were the crusades but an attempt to push religion out to more boundaries, to gain more people to follow their beliefs, in effect, ANOTHER form of greed. One of parishioners?

It's a juicy topic but, I think I could argue that a form of greed is behind even the religious evils of the world... and thus, I think, Greed does win out!

I'd have to go with greed. To argue against my bias, some religions do some good. Greed stems from a terminal lack of humility, nothing good comes from greed.

If we go with a Sam Harris-like definition of religion - something like “believing ideas based on insufficient evidence” - then I think religion would win out. Greed causes a lot of harm, but religion can motivate even good, non-greedy people to do bad things.

Greed and religion are one in the same. The driving force behind the most brutal, bloody wars was based upon religious hatred, and land-grab. Today in the U.S. they have united themselves together into the "religious right wing christian conservatives"... they are in control of the country, and their strings are only pulled by the Global Bankers who own it all. Step back far enough and you'll plainly see the orchestrations taking place. Their 'religion' is control. Control the people, control the money, control the food supply, control the drug industry, down to the very air we breathe.

It is hard to differentiate between the two things – greed and religion; because religion IMO is a particularly nasty form of social engineering designed to take advantage of the spiritual needs most people have for the benefit of a ruling class.

The most obvious example is Christianity – a religion created 400 years after the death of Jesus by the same people who killed him, the Romans and the Hebrews. Christians today who have little understanding of the extent of their programing need look no further than Iran to understand what a theocracy is and they need to, because that is what Christianity was in the beginning. And the funny thing – it wasn’t even a new idea – the one God concept had been cycling around the Middle East for many years before the creation of Christianity in Egypt (Ra/Aten) and what is now Iran (Zoroastrianism), ironic huh? Most probably the Hebrews had just plagiarized the Old Testament stuff to pretend they were “special”.

Christianity was imposed by the Romans as a means to control vastly varied peoples in present day Europe who they conquered. What better way to control people than to make them sheep by threatening their afterlife – which is in itself a form of greed – what greater greed is there than wanting to be alive forever? It’s also lost to most there was no independent reasoning allowed as Mass was carried out in Latin.

The main purpose of Christianity is conformity and surrender to authority, supposedly to God – but practically it’s the greedy assholes that have all the power who benefit, e.g., Mega Churches, Political Parties, etc.. But in a way it’s a mutual arrangement, like a real good con job. Unfortunately, the afterlife thing is a perfect Ponzi scheme no one ever comes back to sue over.

Religion, greed, power, control… all facets of the same darkness that leads to war and oppression and various atrocities.

Greed would seem to be more of a survival instinct and hence natural religion just seems to be an excuse to focus excessive greed on a minority group.

Terrific question and I'm unsure of the answer. But religion seems to be more vicious with their deceptive mind tricks on children with their bs stories. At least the greedy usually seem pretty blatant about their intentions?

Greed.
Should have made a Poll instead.

They are both Pernicious religion is intellectually disabling, .. Greed is easier to escape from

I think religion is to blame for dividing and deflecting attention. The rest fell into place after!...

I think both are responsible for a lot of atrocity, and in many ways religion has served as a tool for the greedy, or the wealthy elite, to pacify the masses and to accept their wealth and power as coming from God. In other words the worst behavior of religious types has been rooted in avarice and greed, but I also think there are many that do have good intentions and try to give back. So I think it's actually greed, and until we start calling it out and rooting out corruption it will doom us all to extinction long before religion would...

I'm gonna go with greed on this one.

Religion in the service of greed.

They seem to go hand in hand.

Greed drives inhumanity, in which religion becomes the tool that covers their motives.

Greed is bad enough - it is amplified when religion is used to justify it.

But - on their own - I'd say greed.

Greed does not sexually abuse children, religion does.
Greed is the reason we go to work

Great question. It's tough because they both do such harm. However to me, since one is purely economic I 'd have to say religion is worse. All of the current wars are based on religion and that spills over to the economies of the war torn places. Since more people die in the name of religion I'd have to go with religion.

This is a good question. I'll share my thoughts and explain them in simple terms. Religion causes more social harm. Greed is actually a good concept (good is an ethics terms, not a moral term such as 'right' or 'wrong'. In mathematics there is an application termed, 'Game Theory' whereby we can use metrics to predict human behavior. As we look for constants in math, we find very few when it comes to human behavior. However, greed seems to be one of the constants. We can break motivations into three basic categories; money, power and prestige. So, in doing, we can quite accurately predict human behavior when we use greed of money, power and/or prestige as the motivator. Greed isn't so much a social harm as a great predictor of human behavior. I guess one could argue greed causes many means of social harm, but, depending on how you view 'social harm' greed doesn't create the social ills, it is just the motivator to create social ills.

Religion on the other hand does quite a bit of social harm. While both these abstract concepts do not actually 'do' anything (I've yet to ever experience an idea 'doing' anything, people perform actions, ideas do not) religion, quite the opposite of greed, prepares the human mind to draw illogical conclusions to logical rationale. Greed is very natural and exists as a natural survival motivator; self-preservation at its base. Religion on the other hand is an evolution of abstract concept, natural in that it is quite natural to extrapolate, unnatural in its end, or illogical conclusions. As all religion is taught (usually from an early age) what it actually does is prepare the human mind to disregard facts of the natural world and attribute conclusions to concepts that may not be refuted. It is for this reason that we currently see large populations of people, when presented with facts that have been verified independently, disregard the facts for conclusions they prefer. This is a product of religious conditioning. I could write much more about why and how this conditioning comes about, but the resulting product seems to point more and more to the facilitating of social ills. If one takes actions that lead to social ills based solely off 'it is right', rather than, 'I'm seeking to gain the most for doing the least' (greed and the natural state of all animals in conserving energy), then I would conclude religion is the more harmful of the two.

I think religion causes more harm because there haven't been genocides committed for greed but there have been for religious beliefs.

Thats a fight between the #1 and #2 spots...

World-wide, I would definitely say religion, just check the news to see proof of this. In the U.S. specifically, it is a toss-up. Both are bad, but it is okay to speak out against greed

Wow... that's a really tough one to answer. I'm going to say religion, simply because greed can be a motivator by itself, but religion can be a singular motivator or it can ALSO be influenced by greed while still pretending to be religiously motivated. Religion pretends at a lot of things, but seems to have a lot of other factors driving it. Never forget, religion is merely a tool used to exert control over others. It was the first tool of government.