Stanford anthropology professor Rene Girard posits that people have developed religious rites to reinforce social stratification and violence. He identifies certain types of behaviors as being basic to all religious practice and a cornerstone of how states are organized, in particular "mimetic envy", which is scapegoating rituals that propagate the violent taking of desired attributes and possessions from outsider groups.

Makes a strong case that religion acculturates conquest and that these behaviors are rooted in powerful, ancient instincts. Available free on Googlebooks:

Violence and the Sacred - René Girard - Google Books
books.google.com › Religion › General
Rating: 4 - 20 reviews
This brilliant study of good and evil examines the presence of ritual violence in sacred ceremony.

Then the answer is simple enough, false reasoning underlays violence.

Governments do not do anything ever. They are organizations of individuals working in concert. So, blame the people who have agency, that is who take actions and make decisions. That goes right back to delusional thinking, like believing a metaphysical world exists in parallel with reality and that world sets rules for conduct.

Please see my comment about Girard's theories, and take a look at the Google Book.

but persons do. Religion is a mental concept, not an actor.

much more than that. It is obviously designed to equate religion with violence. An extremely biased mindset and potentially dangerous one at that.

methodological individualism, social phenomenology, interactionism and ethnomethodology that hold individual consciousness to be a self-developing phenomenon.

There's no separating the two in the ancient world.

Separating "governments" from the people who act within them is ridiculous. Can you have a government with no people in it? Can you have a religion without people practicing it? No people.... no government or religion. Both are concepts made up by people.

Especially for non-historic cultures.

I find your question rather leading. "Which comes first, violence or religion?" implies that religion is violent in itself and clearly that is not the case.

However, since history proves that violence has occurred to promote both religion and atheism, violence would appear to be a product of humanity and not of religion nor atheism.

Maslow is your friend here...

which tries to put in 2 different "which came first" questions. I withdraw my earlier claim that it was all about only one of them.

I've read a theory by the SF-author Stephen Baxter that belief in the supernatural evolved because it gave hope where others would have resigned.

ways, which I understand was around 5 million years ago.

Goodall's and others' observations have shown that chimpanzees wage territorial war against neighboring bands, kidnap and kill infants and commit what in a human context would be first degree murder.

No one, so far, has observed chimpanzees going to Mass or teaching religion to their offspring.

Great book about this.

For those interested, Amazon has several used copies for 10-12 cents plus shipping.

I think you will enjoy it. It was quite an eye opener for me.

We evolved from violent ancestral species. I doubt they were religious.

Religion provides easy definitions of us and them. I think that without religion different ways would be found to separate us into us and them.