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Notes -
I don't think the 'inoculation' idea is realistic, those ideologies have been turned towards justifying plenty of atrocities in recent history (slavery, native genocides, etc). I think that any religion could be turned towards those ends if that's what its leaders and zealots want to be doing with their time.
(Well, maybe not the Jains. You always gotta caveat the Jains.)
To whit:
I don't think there's really a conflict between these two views, as evidenced by the fact the Christians and Jews who live comfortably in peaceful societies don't commit this type of sadism and murder en masse.
Yes, people need a justification for doing horrible things, something that lets them tell themselves a story about how they are justified or good. Religion is one of several things that can provide this type of justification.
But people also need a motivation to do horrible things. The justification isn't itself a motivation, it just allows you to act on that motive, and live with yourself afterwards.
Terrible conditions are one of several things that can provide this type of motive.
To stop horrible things happening en masse, we can get rid of all the justifications, or we can get rid of all the motives. Or, ideally, both.
I think that working on the motives is lower-hanging fruit, partially because people can just invent new justifications really easily when they want to, but mostly because the motivations are usually themselves stemming from bad things that it is good to fix.
I think that's a lot of the lefty view of these systems and how to address them, and I don't think it's incompatible with these insights into religious justifications. As an atheist, I'm fully capable of intellectually understanding what that perspective would look like to someone who actually believed it, and at the same time thinking that cleaning up the terrible conditions pushing them into those actions is the best way to solve the problem.
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