Religion, on its own, is nothing. It is a set of ideas, with no power or agency to act of it's own accord. It takes people to manipulate it, for good or bad.

The reason religion often falls far short of its purported 'loving' ideals in the public mind is simply due to the fact that so-called good believers don't have the stomach to spurn and shut out the bad believers, keep from power those who have the will to manipulate and exploit religion for unsavory purposes that have nothing to do with religion in the first place.

As long as religion can be utilized as a mechanism of political power or social control, it will never attain the respect its adherents crave. Of course, it has to be said of adherents that they can not be reasoned with if they are so blinded by their own virtue, such that they can't even fathom they might be in the wrong where their application of belief is concerned.