Does 'religion' lead to suicide bombings and other violence?

The claim is frequently heard on the lips of the most prominent secular authors and speakers (dubbed the "New Atheists" or "Brights"), such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, that religion is not just intellectually wrong, it's also morally repugnant. 

In order to back this claim, such authors point to such things as the 9/11 attacks and the many suicide bombings throughout recent history.  These are marshaled together as evidence of the evils of "Religion." 

In the recent book "God is Good, God is Great" (ed. by William Lane Craig and Chad Meister and published by InterVarsity Press), two serous flaws in this often-heard argument are noted by Oxford scholar Alister McGrath in his essay "Is Religion Evil?":

“The first point to make is simple: individual religions exist; “religion” doesn’t. The Enlightenment was characterized by a love of universals, most famously stated in the idea of a universal human reason, whose fundamental characteristics were independent of history and culture. For the Enlightenment, this universal human reason could be the basis of a true, global ethic and philosophy, which would sweep aside irrational superstitions as relics of a barbarous past. In the end, this noble idea proved to be unworkable, in that human patterns of reasoning turned out to be much more culturally conditioned than had been realized.
     The key point here is that the Enlightenment understandably yet wrongly regarded “religion” as a universal category. During the period of colonial expansion, many Europeans came across worldviews that differed from their own and chose to label them as “religions,” when in fact many of these, such as Confucianism, were better regarded as philosophies of life. Some were explicitly nontheistic, yet the Enlightenment belief in a universal notion called “religion” led to these being forced into the same mold.
In recent years, there has been a concerted criticism of this unhelpful and deeply problematic approach. It is increasingly agreed that definitions of religion tend to reflect the agendas and bias of those who propose them. There is still no definition of “religion” which commands scholarly assent.”  (p.122)

McGrath goes on to point out the fallacy of the religion-suicide bombers link in light of empirical studies done on the subject:

“The New Atheism, of course, argues that religious worldviews offer motivations for violence that are not paralleled elsewhere—for example, the thought of entering paradise after a suicidal attack. Yet this conclusion is premature, and needs very careful nuancing. For Dawkins and Harris, it is obvious that it is religious belief that leads directly to suicide bombings. It’s a view that his less-critical secular readers will applaud, provided they haven’t read the empirical studies of why people are driven to suicide bombings in the first place.
      As Robert Pape showed in his definitive account of the motivations of such attacks, based on surveys of every known case of suicide bombing since 1980, religious belief of any kind does not appear to be either a necessary or a sufficient condition to create suicide bombers. The infamous “suicide vest,” for example, was invented by TamilTigers in 1991, leading to a large number of suicide attacks from this ethic group. Pape’s analysis of the evidence suggests that the fundamental motivation for suicide bombings appears to be political, not religious—namely, the desire to force withdrawal of foreign forces occupying land believed to belong to an oppressed people who have seriously limited military resources at their disposal.
      The New Atheism offers a superficial explanation for suicide bombings, designed to resonate with cultural anxieties about the heightened profile of religion in the United States and many parts of the world. Yet it is not a sustainable analysis, which does little to help us understand why these bombings arise and what can be done to prevent them. They have simply been hijacked as part of a crude atheist apologetic, rather than taken seriously as a cultural and social phenomenon. Happily, there are many serous studies, particularly from an anthropological perspective (including the important work of Scott Atran of the University of Michigan), which point in more realistic and informed directions. For Atran, the solution to suicide bombings is not the excoriation of religion, still less its suppression, but the empowerment of religious moderates.” (pp.123-124, emphasis added)

Of course, not all atheists make such claims.  Thankfully there are many atheists who are both intellectually honest and quite civil in their critiques of various forms of religious faith (a great example of such is Hemant Mehta, aka. "The Friendly Atheist", whose book "I Sold My Soul on eBay" is a must-read for any Christian looking to reach out to their secular friends!).