No bombs are smart enough to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, between the dangerous and the powerless. By manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, including missiles, cluster bombs, and landmines, we all give our tacit assent to the killing of civilians.
In our everyday world, we are all familiar with the linguistic reality that “terrorism” is a bad word and “terrorists” are bad people. On the other hand, “war” is usually a good word, or at least a neutral word, and “warriors” are frequently our greatest heros.
To say that religion is a set of human phenomena is to emphasize that it is too nebulous and too fuzzy to be captured and imprisoned in a net of rigid categories.