Atheism and atrocities

I don't put this here because I think it's so interesting for us to discuss, though maybe it is. I just happened to do a few minutes of research putting these numbers together and wanted to put them somewhere they wouldn't get deleted. (tickerjoe, by the way, was "executed" over on the other forum...)

The resident militant atheist pulled out his dusty list of religious people who liked to kill people in the name of God. You know the names: Calvin, Joshua, Moses, Torquemada, etc. The point, of course, is that religion is dangerous. Especially if you happen to live in 16th century Switzerland or ancient Canaan. Anyway, I wanted to review not ancient history but the past century and its greatest atrocities.

For me, a stunning but little known genocide would be the "hunger murder" where the atheist regime in Moscow created an artificially-induced famine in the Ukraine in 1937 that killed some 7 million people.

Add the atheist Stalin's purges, and you end up with 23,000,000 dead. Twenty-three million. And there's of course millions more when you add Lenin, et al.

The atheistic cultural revolution in China alone was responsible directly for the deaths of some 30,000,000 but Mao's tyranny actually killed on the order of 50-70 million people.

We know from the Table Talk that Hitler was certainly NOT Christian--he viewed Christianity as a Jewish gutter religion. He was basically Nietzschean atheist with a fetish for paganism. 12,000,000 dead.

Tojo? 5,000,000 dead civilians.

The secularist regime in Turkey committed and defends still a massacre of Armenians, 2 million died.

Pol Pot (atheist) had killing fields where nearly 2 million died.

The North Korean Regime (atheist) has killed nearly 2 million in purges.

Menhistu in Ethiopia (atheist), 1.5 million killed.

And on and on.

Just a note on Torquemada in context: Professor Henry Kamen's now classic scholarly work on the Spanish Inquisition suggests that over the 300 years of the Inquisition, perhaps some 3,000-5,000 people died. Atheists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of the mid-1930s killed ten times as many people (37,000 by estimate) who were priests and nuns, and this is not to count their other victims. Killing ten times as many priests and nuns as the entire Inquisition killed people, and not over 300 years but over three years. Ten times more bloody in one percent of the time. That's twentieth century atheism. And that's the kind of story that the academy and mass media tend not to tell.

The past century is the century atheists prefer to ignore, apparently, in their fear-mongering about Calvin or Torquemada. (And so long as we're looking that far back, how about not ignoring the Enlightenment reign of terror that post-dates the Inquisition and that in a couple of years produced ten times the dead of the Inquisition.)

Was actually conducted for secualr reasons but using religon as an excuse. The king of Spain was going broke and looking to restock his coffers. He turned to a wealthy portion of his kingdom, Jews who had converted to Catholism. Using charges that these Catholics were in secret still Jews he arrested them and gave them one of two choices, confess or die. Either way the king usurped their property. If you confessed, you were kicked out of Spain (and our land stays put).

The Catholic Church in Rome protested the complicity of the Church in Spain, which in turn thumbed it's nose at Rome.

Almost every "religous" conflict has a secular entanglment, even the Prodestant Reformation and the ensuing violence.

When you think about "religous wars", wars fought to convert the population of any area to another faith, there are very few. About the only one I can point to is the spead of Islam across Arabia, Afica and into Spain.

(and I'm basing this on my very limited knowledge, so feel free to correct me) had a secular element to them, in that they had to do with a desire for land and property as well.

...most war comes down to control of land. I would suppose religon comes up because it was the defining cultural distinction between those vying for control.

The spread of Islam was rather stunnig, from Mohomed's cave to Spain in 50 years. Wow!!!