Atheistic bloodthirstiness (by D. D'Souza)

[A_Nony_Mouse]

At the Christian Science Monitor website, Mr. D'Souza writes:
"These figures [number of victims due to the Inquisition and the Crusades] are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people."

Afterwards, he refutes some claims that are made in End of Faith (by Sam Harris) and The God Delusion (by Richard Dawkins) in order to show that they are holding Christianity responsible for the crimes committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the greater crimes committed in their name.

He concludes:
"Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades.

It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history."
(D'Souza, D. (11/26/2006), "Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history", http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p09s01-coop.html)

Can you spot the fallacies?


PS: The text between square brackets is added by me.

130 years of wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics were motivated by atheism. Now lets here the Pope was an atheist.

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Fucker makes it difficult for them....



Of course, if a xtian can con himself into believing the shit in his/her fucking bible I guess nothing is out of reach of their ability to deny reality.

Nice picture but to be honest no one has found any pro-religion statement from him that is not in a political speech or writing saying what we would expect a politician to say. Not that I can think of a reason to care other than looking at the evidence. For example, he was a Catholic. There is no record of him being in any church much less the mandatory Sundays for anything other than marriages and baptisms just like any friend or politician might. He had a secular charity he pushed around Christmas but that is about it. No Easter messages. Plenty of generic god references, a few Jesuses but next to nothing on theology claims.

Of course I am not an expert. However I do read people who do claim to be expert. The Jews who engage in ritual cursing and condemnation of him would take any opportunity to associate him with Christianity and Catholicism in particular. If anyone can find anything I missed please post it.

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The last few decades would be starting with the eighties. Have communists really killed more people than Christians and Muslims combined in the last few decades? I seem to recall half a million Tutsis being killed by (mostly) Catholics, off the top of my head.

I don't have a dog in that fight but the Hutu/Tutsi thing has nothing to do with religion. They are different tribes. That is all that matters. The tribes may have different religions. It is not a cause of the conflict.

As for communists, mainly Russian and Chinese, they are in first place in the ranks of 20th c. killings. However they are way down in the "for reasons of religion" category. What pissed off the Catholics of all stripes is they put the church in its place and took away all of its perqs and lands and such. Mexico did the same thing about the same time. And the Catholics tried to stir up the same attitude towards Mexico as towards Russia but failed.

There were plenty of operating churches in communist Russia (NOT China) as long as they did not oppose the government.

China was against Christianity long before communism. Overlooked because of the American Civil War is that China was fighting a civil war that was longer and overlapped the ACW. It killed many times more. The cause of it was an end times charismatic Christian. China has been as diligent against a repeat of that as the US is diligent against the return of slavery. That sounds silly because no one is advocating slavery. But nearly every Christian sect in the world in advocating Christianity in China.

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The great killer is neither religion nor atheism. It's science & technology. Kinda tough to really rack up the numbers with your bare hands.

That sounds like nonsense but I will give you a chance to present your examples and evidence before I formally ridicule the statement. The European population increased during both WWI and WWII due to science and technology as did life expectancy.

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Genghis Khan did not do so badly but your point is well-taken, for once. Marvelous indeed that the protestants and catholics did not have machine guns while they were squabbling about whether or not to read the fucking bible in Latin or French/English/Dutch/German, etc.

But if talking deaths in war usually ten times more died of diseases than died in combat. Sieges were as likely to end from disease inside the walls as from disease among those besieging the walls.

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Most, if not all, conflicts are about territory... and, with it, resources and wealth.
Religion is just an excuse. A quite common excuse, but still, an excuse.

"guns" don't kill people,
People kill people.

Regardless of religion being given as a reason the rate of war appears to be about the same.

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Well, Americans do.

And I hear they start at 2 years old... -.-'

Fortunately that is Darwin award material.

Unfortunately the easily correctable poisons under the sink are so common a cause of death they do not ever make the news.

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Point of history. The Holy See was the first sovereign nation to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany, guaranteeing the Catholic church certain rights, basically in exchange for its silence and enhanced government support.

I did not know that. Thank you for the information!

Sort of old news, really. Rome did in fact withhold approval and support for no reason other than as a bargaining chip. That Hitler was Catholic made the deal easier. It was purely diplomatic maneuvering.

There was nothing in particular of any "evil" import it was supporting at the time of the treaty. At the time the worst that had happened to Jews was the one day boycott of jewish shops on a Saturday when they were closed for the Sabbath. That is nothing to write home about.