A Pew poll revealed that church-going Christians are more likely to sanction torture than the general population. People not affiliated with organized religion are less-likely to approve of torture.
You might wonder if those depictions of Jesus being tortured to death has desensitized Christians to the concept of torture but it appears not to be so because more evangelical Christians approve of torture than do Catholics and the latter group use the Jesus-on-the-cross more than do evangelicals.
My conclusion is that evangelicals have an inherent character-defect which is evident in their support for the Republican party. Both evangelicals and Republicans have demonstrated that they are motivated by fear and leaders of these groups motivate their followers (sheep) through the use of fear (fear of terrorists, socialism, Obama, the big bad wolf and hell).
Unfortunately, the Pew poll didn't include Pastafarians, a group more likely to be motivated by fun and not easily frightened. After all when your deity is a monster, you got no worries.
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Humans have big brains and a strong vestigial survival instinct (self-interest), which includes a strong instinct to "belong" to a group. These get us into trouble because we allow the survival instinct to take over far too often. The current "rule books of society" (Bible/Tora/Koran/etc.) all seem to offer socially acceptable justification to lend the survival instinct more credibility than it deserves. If children are only exposed to the fear, violence, hate, deception present these books, it just feeds into the survival instinct, and of course that's how they will live their lives and think their thoughts. These children then grow up with these attitudes and become influential members of society who condone the kinds of violence presented by the rules of life in the family bible. Since there were no other influences in these people's lives, they don't have any sense of "other" only "self".
I think Jesus would probably torture himself if he had to torture anyone. Any Jesus fans interested in being "Christ-like"?
I didn't think so.
The new testament has a story about Jesus stopping an angry mob from stoning a woman to death by saying, "He who is without sin, throw the first stone."
Apparently right-wing Christians (evangelicals) aren't very Christ-like or they ignore the parts of the Bible that don't resonate with their mindsets.
You make good points about our society being tribal. In this case the tribe is the church and evangelicals tend to believe that they have the only correct religion (ergo, they are superior to the rest of us) and perhaps that justifies torture, hate, jingoism, etc.
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