Is belief the root of all evil?

Belief doesn't do the forcing. I believe all drugs should be legal, yet I am not forced to do drugs because I believe they should be available. Therefore the opposite is true. If you force someone to not do something it is not because of your belief it is because of the force.

Money is not inherently good nor bad. It is how it is used that makes it bad or good. You can believe money is evil but it's not. If it were then you could never do anything good with it, but clearly you can, so it's obviously not evil.

what is the reason for forcing others to do something? Is it not belief in something?

No, it's generally a means to achieve a certain result. It's a consequentialist agenda, whether one realizes it or not.

No one robs a bank to uphold a principle of theft. They rob a bank to get money.

No one commits murder to uphold the principle of murder. They do it so that their victim will be dead.

By "consequentialist agenda" I only mean that it's an action performed in order to achieve a desired consequence.

When someone is going to rob a bank he has a belief that money is good, does he not?

Well, perhaps. But he also believes he can be successful, and a number of other things. It may be that believing that money is good is partly the cause of robbing the bank. But how does that mean that all beliefs are the root of all evil? How about my belief that someone is a needy person which causes me to help him?

Because we want to avoid rhetoric. 'Evil' is the buzzword of militant propaganda. In an emotionally detached conversation, emotionally detached language is more helpful.

Care to share some of the direct causes?

When someone is going to rob a bank he has a belief that money is good, does he not?

Paul I am perplexed at your silence toward Eudaimon and his antisemitism , does this type of rhetoric belong in a forum like ours

Paul I am perplexed at your silence toward Eudaimon and his antisemitism , does this type of rhetoric belong in a forum like ours

I am not a moderator if it is allowed then I will leaving at that, it makes me uncomfortable, my mother was Jewish as where you folks

Now you are being ridiculous. Because you just pointed out your belief. Need I show it to you?

If you say seeing a person in need and if you help them, it will be pleasant. That is a belief.

Is it always pleasant to help someone in need?
How did you come to the conclusion that it would be pleasant?
What would be the very first motivation to help someone in need? If you have never helped before, you wouldn't know it would be pleasant to do it. Therefore you would have to be acting on some other motivation to help.

Not a personal attack but you have a bogus argument. (probably could have left this out)

Anti-Semitism caused Nazism and in tune also has its causes, therefore if we, as analysts, want to understand why people started hating and killing Jews we should try to find them. So, I am asking again what is here that offends anyone?

That's not an offensive statement. Probably the most offensive routine statement that people (not you) make about the Holocaust is that it happened because the Jews went to their deaths like sheep. I also find it offensive that Hitler and his henchmen had some alternative moral scheme, and it was therefore morally "right" at least in their own eyes, because history shows that they didn't exactly believe this either.

To be clear, I disagree from an historical point of view that anti-Semitism "caused" Nazism. Anti-Semitism, the likes of which Hitler sucked up like wine when he was growing up in Austria, had been around for centuries. The unification of anti-Semitism with fascism is what gave Nazism its character, but you need to look at why fascism developed in Germany to really understand why the Nazi anti-Semitic program ever got anywhere. After all, anti-Semitism was FAR worse in Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Poland than in Germany at the time.

No one is to blame except the perpetrators. Very few people except at the highest echelons actually coordinated the whole thing, starting from the pre-war persecutions through the various forms of murder and exploitation. But many people in that sort of environment turned on their neighbors, i.e. called them out and turned them into the Nazis, and became accessories in their own way.

It was a permissive culture, but I don't specifically blame Christianity per se for it. Yes, most Nazis were Christians, but they specifically rejected the nearly ubiquitous Christian principles of mercy for the weak and admonition against killing.

No one is to blame except the perpetrators. Very few people except at the highest echelons actually coordinated the whole thing, starting from the pre-war persecutions through the various forms of murder and exploitation. But many people in that sort of environment turned on their neighbors, i.e. called them out and turned them into the Nazis, and became accessories in their own way.

It was a permissive culture, but I don't specifically blame Christianity per se for it. Yes, most Nazis were Christians, but they specifically rejected the nearly ubiquitous Christian principles of mercy for the weak and admonition against killing.

No one is responsible since according to science there is no one to be responsible, am I right?

Everithing is in a strict cause-effect chain. Is it not scientific view? If no, please, enlighten me.