Science and scientists have been responsible for mass death well, as soldiers coughing up their lungs in the WW1 trench gas wars could attest, or incinerated Japanese children in Hiroshima affirm. I never understood the attempt to hold out religion as a particularly and uniquely fertile ground for evil and violence.
The thing about the Bible is that it is a collection of books with different literary styles, very little of which was actually analytical history or modern biography.
There are a lot of stories, parables, poems, literature in the Bible that have only a passing relationship to true historical narrative.
There is no archeological evidence of mass destruction and genocide of the Cannanites or Amalekites in the late Bronze Age.
The data just ain't there to support it.
We have to allow authors of literature to use hyperbole and literary licence. What actually probably happened were skirmishes between the Israelites and their neighbors, but not wholesale destruction and mass genocide.