MURDER, GENOCIDE, and ATHEISTS.

[Revoltingest]

Your usually on point so I won't disagree and who am I to generalise numbers as easily as you, but you seemed to have forgotten, "Diderot, Voltaire, Sade, and Rosseau, who worshiped the cult of reason, murdered 300,000 Frenchmen, most for not being good atheists."

Reason....there's the real culprit for evil in the world.

 

[Audie]

Ah, my mistake. Thought you were talking about the KMT civil war a century ago (from now).

You folks do like a scrap

No prob., I do not expect people to know Chinese history.

 

[Audie]

Reason....there's the real culprit for evil in the world.

Tell those boys to stop it.

 

[Revoltingest]

Tell those boys to stop it.

Most people already have.

 

[Milton Platt]

One need not be in this forum very long to learn that the atheists here, for the most part, are in full attack mode when it comes to Christianity.

One of their favorite lines of attack is to cite the historical violence of some Christians as a brand on all Christians, with the inference that Christianity is itself a failed endeavor.

Actually, there is a bit of truth to this, when the Church and government became one with Constantine, the greed for money and power superseded the Christian sensibilities of many who claimed to be Christians, and in the name of Christianity, murder and genocide occurred. The hybrid monster of the church and state, or the state and church working together for the same goals corrupted the church.

However, for every brutal leader supported by the church, there were many Christians with no government association who lived the Christian lifestyle and followed in the footsteps of Christ.

What was done in the name of Christianity by a corrupt church and government must be recognized, and cannot be defended.

Since atheists like to put the burning tire of murder and genocide on the neck of most any Christian, I thought a look at the atheist track record in this regard would be worthwhile.

I have pages of specific citations, so, if in the following you feel you need a citation for a sentence or paragraph, I will happily supply it.

According to an article by Christian apologist Gregory Koukl, with citations; " The assertion is that religion has caused most of the bloodshed in the world. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false, this is one of them"According to Le Monde, atheist regimes killed 100 million people in the 20th century, via genocide.

The reign of terror in France, whose leaders were influenced by Diderot, Voltaire, Sade, and Rosseau, who worshiped the cult of reason, murdered 300,000 Frenchmen, most for not being good atheists.,The details of their torture and their slaughter are revolting.

Koukl summarizes by stating that " It is true that religion can possibly produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail, it produces evil because the individual people are living in rejection of Christianity and the God that they are supposed to be following.n so it can produce evil but the historical fact is that the outright rejection of God and institutionalizing atheism actually does produce evil at incredible levels"

I'm an atheist and I understand your view of this question. Usually, (for me at least) I don't much bother bringing this up. When I do it is in response to an argument that goes something like this "Stalin (or Hitler, or Pol Pot, etc.) was an atheist and killed a bunch of people, therefore all atheists have no morals". I think it is time that everyone realized that neither following a religion or eschewing all religions guarantees that each and every person of either persuasion will turn out to be perfectly moral. That is because in the end, it is neither religion nor atheism that produces the overall moral character of anyone.
There is one distinctive difference to note, however. No violence has been done in the name of atheism, while violence done by religious people has sometimes been done in the name of their religion or because of it. But again, it does not follow that this means all Christians, or any other religious group should be painted with a broad brush.
Discussions on here become heated sometimes, and frustrating at others, and people start making statements that have elements of truth, but are stated too broadly and too simplistically.

 

[Milton Platt]

Nice try, but wrong. The main reasons for war have always been economic gain, territorial gain, civil and revolutionary conflicts. According to Philip Axelrod in his monumental " Encyclopedia of War", only 7% of all wars from 8000 BC to the present were religious in nature. If you subtract Islamic wars from the equation, on 3.2 % were of a religious cause. 96% of all wars on the planet had nothing to do with religion.

Can you provide a source for your numbers? It will save me a great deal of time having to check endless docs on the internet. Thanks. I doubt them, but it's only fair not to call foul until I see them for myself. Always willing to learn new things. But let's go with the 7% for the moment. Unless the Islamic wars did not involve religion??? So how many wars have been fought in total? And what would 7% of that total be? Is it justified to say that Christians/Islam/name your other religion are superior in any way because they killed fewer people? Is morality dependent on the number of people one kills? at what point does one become immoral? One body? 100 bodies? 1000 bodies?

There probably has never been a time in human history that there wasn't somebody fighting somewhere. Define "war" for us so we are all talking about the same thing.

 

[loverofhumanity]

The only truth there is that you have stated
what you choose to believe.

Yes that’s only my own personal view. What you say is true too.

Today I’m eating vegetarian.

 

[ChristineM]

You may have missed this earlier.

The myth of the murderous Muslim

I did miss it, nothing groundbreakingly new for me though

List of countries by population in 1500 - Wikipedia

Interesting, it doesnt have an entry for india

 

[Skreeper]

Yep, the 300,000 thousand of the French revolution are chicken feed, as I have already said, count them out.
The hundreds of millions murdered by atheists still stand.

Atheism is an idea, Christianity is ideology.

Word parsing and hair splitting.

The lack of established moral standards in the IDEA of atheism gave these tyrants the ability to give themselves permission to slaughter.

Atheism is amoral. Morality is a nebulous concept that the individual must determine for himself. For Stalin, kill a few million people, that is his morality, for another, snuff films fit into his morality, for another, adultery, for another, shop lifting.

Of course, one atheist should not judge the morality of another atheist, because that is a personal thing, unique to himself.

You still don´t get it, do you ?

If you need someone else to tell you that killing millions of people is evil, then you have a big problem buddy.

 

[sooda]

If you need someone else to tell you that killing millions of people is evil, then you have a big problem buddy.

So much for morality.

 

[Audie]

If you need someone else to tell you that killing millions of people is evil, then you have a big problem buddy.

Next time someone starts a thread like this,
please post that, and, please, nobody else say
anything.

 

[Augustus]

My number for the muslim conquest of india us 80 million, far, far below the 400 million...

Well you argued 400 was plausible because you assumed the population of India was 600 million instead of 70 million. When presented with evidence of this error, you strangely enough didn't think to question if your original "conservative" estimate of 80 million might also have been equally fantastical.

You can lead a horse to water and all that...

As for the rest, straw men and there is a difference between providing citations and stomping your foot... If you dont agree with my numbers then provide evidence that cannot be refuted.

My numbers are not Impossible, simply repeating that statement does not make it true

Repeating the word "strawman" without comment is not an argument.

As for your numbers, the logical place to start would be why do you actually think that is true in the first place? It's not like you've presented any evidence other than a list copied off reddit and something else that claimed the population of India was higher than that of the entire world.

How Many People Have Been Killed in the Name of Religion? : atheism

Even though you obviously have not looked at the issue with any degree of scepticism, hence your elementary errors, you still assert it as unquestionable fact as it is "not impossible".

As for 'cannot be refuted' or 'not impossible', it's like saying prove Jesus didn't rise from the dead or walk on water, you can't do this, you just have to use your brain. It's a Kent Hovind challenge. I can't objectively 'prove' that the Persians didn't invade with Greece with 2 million troops, or that the Arabs weren't helped by angels when they defeated the Romans, yet that doesn't make these any less ridiculous.

As to your claim, it's pretty obvious when you look at the demography and economy:

Country X has experienced 4 centuries of great economic growth and has undergone a population increase similar to the rest of the world over this time.

At the same time, this county has experienced 'the greatest genocide of all time', a 400 year long exposure to violence 'conservatively' estimated at the level of the 30 Years War which devastated Europe.

Alternatively, we can say the equivalent of a country that lost people to violence at the same rate as Nazi Germany during the industrialised slaughter of WW2 (including the holocaust in Germany) for an entire 4 centuries is thriving. This is a country in which, on average, around 15-25% of people who reach adulthood would die a violent death.

Unfortunately, the only evidence we have to support the idea the greatest genocide in history happened this way is a collection of sources that we know, for a fact, are making up numbers out of thin air and have neither the ability or desire to craft numbers based on an objective, robust scientific methodology. We know, for a fact, that all such sources across all such cultures faced this same issue.

In light of incomplete information we are left with inaccurate literary sources which generally serve as propaganda or hagiography (as all 'history' did back then), versus basic logic, empirical experience and what we know about the realities of running historical empires.

As such, when being presented with this information, it seems most reasonable to assume:

a) It probably happened
b) It probably didn't happen


(Another thing would be to consider the very concept itself "Muslim invasions". There is no reason to treat these as a single event, any more than an Indian historian should treat the Napoleonic wars to WW2 as the "Germanic Invasions", call them the greatest genocide in history and say 250 million people died during them. It's the historical equivalent of saying "well, they all look the same..." In European history, the equivalent of a Mongol (Timur) invading a Muslim Sultanate that had existed for over a century would not be considered as part of the 'same thing' as the Turko-Persian invasion which formed that Sultanate)

 

[ChristineM]

Well you argued 400 was plausible because you assumed the population of India was 600 million instead of 70 million. When presented with evidence of this error, you strangely enough didn't think to question if your original "conservative" estimate of 80 million might also have been equally fantastical.

You can lead a horse to water and all that...



Repeating the word "strawman" without comment is not an argument.

As for your numbers, the logical place to start would be why do you actually think that is true in the first place? It's not like you've presented any evidence other than a list copied off reddit and something else that claimed the population of India was higher than that of the entire world.

How Many People Have Been Killed in the Name of Religion? : atheism

Even though you obviously have not looked at the issue with any degree of scepticism, hence your elementary errors, you still assert it as unquestionable fact as it is "not impossible".

As for 'cannot be refuted' or 'not impossible', it's like saying prove Jesus didn't rise from the dead or walk on water, you can't do this, you just have to use your brain. It's a Kent Hovind challenge. I can't objectively 'prove' that the Persians didn't invade with Greece with 2 million troops, that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.

As to your claim, it's pretty obvious when you look at the demography and economy:

Country X has experienced 4 centuries of great economic growth and has undergone a population increase similar to the rest of the world over this time.

At the same time, this county has experienced 'the greatest genocide of all time', a 400 year long exposure to violence 'conservatively' estimated at the level of the 30 Years War which devastated Europe.

Alternatively, we can say the equivalent of a country that lost people to violence at the same rate as Nazi Germany during the industrialised slaughter of WW2 (including the holocaust in Germany) for an entire 4 centuries is thriving. This is a country in which, on average, around 15-25% of people who reach adulthood would die a violent death.

Unfortunately, the only evidence we have to support the idea the greatest genocide in history happened this way is a collection of sources that we know, for a fact, are making up numbers out of thin air and have neither the ability or desire to craft numbers based on an objective, robust scientific methodology. We know, for a fact, that all such sources across all such cultures faced this same issue.

In light of incomplete information we are left with inaccurate literary sources which generally serve as propaganda or hagiography (as all 'history' did back then), versus basic logic, empirical experience and what we know about the realities of running historical empires.

As such, when being presented with this information, it seems most reasonable to assume:

a) It probably happened
b) It probably didn't happen


(Another thing would be to consider the very concept itself "Muslim invasions". There is no reason to treat these as a single event, any more than an Indian historian should treat the Napoleonic wars to WW2 as the "Germanic Invasions", call them the greatest genocide in history and say 250 million people died during them. It's the historical equivalent of saying "well, they all look the same..." In European history, the equivalent of a Mongol (Timur) invading a Muslim Sultanate that had existed for over a century would not be considered as part of the 'same thing' as the Turko-Persian invasion which formed that Sultanate)

Nope i argued that once source claims 400 million and you ran with it.

What error, my list was there before you even started to try to pull just 2 entries of the 50 odd entries apart. On both of your gripes i have justified my use of the figures, because you cannot see 16 generations of massacre or are stuck on wikipedia is not my problem.

When you introduce irrelevant straw men then i feel justified in highlighting them.

As for my numbers a logical place to start is with as many history documents as i can find, it is not up to me, or you, to decide whether the figures massage your ego or not.

And i am getting rather fed up with you going over the same ground repeatedly. As i have asked before, provide irrefutable evidence, of your figures or we are done with this discussion.

 

[shmogie]

If you need someone else to tell you that killing millions of people is evil, then you have a big problem buddy.

Well buddy, you obviously have not followed the thread and have no clue as to the context of the comments.

Commenting on what you don´t grasp is a big problem.

 

[Audie]

Well buddy, you obviously have not followed the thread and have no clue as to the context of the comments.

Commenting on what you don´t grasp is a big problem.

Yes, that is kind of what we have teen trying to
get you to realize.

In this case, you completely missed the obvious-

That you are presenting that without "god",
telling you that it is not cool, you would
readily go out and commit mass murder.

We are wondering what is wrong with you
that you need some "god" to keep you in check,
and, for that matter, why you think others are
like you. We aren't.

 

[shmogie]

Can you provide a source for your numbers? It will save me a great deal of time having to check endless docs on the internet. Thanks. I doubt them, but it's only fair not to call foul until I see them for myself. Always willing to learn new things. But let's go with the 7% for the moment. Unless the Islamic wars did not involve religion??? So how many wars have been fought in total? And what would 7% of that total be? Is it justified to say that Christians/Islam/name your other religion are superior in any way because they killed fewer people? Is morality dependent on the number of people one kills? at what point does one become immoral? One body? 100 bodies? 1000 bodies?

There probably has never been a time in human history that there wasn't somebody fighting somewhere. Define "war" for us so we are all talking about the same thing.

I did provide a source for the numbers, the very respected Encyclopedia of War. The total for wars caused by religion is 7%. If the wars of Muslim conquest are removed from the 7%, it drops to 3. 4. The 7% includes all religious wars, not just by Christian/islam.

I refer you to the source to determine the definition of war that was used.

 

[Audie]

Another "obvious" here is that while this forum
tries to be a friendly one, there was no such
intent in the OP.

The OP is an invidious attack on the
character and decency of a large percent
of this forum. Not to mention millions of others
unknown to any of us.

The OP has no evident intent to attempt to resolve
or improve anything, but has succeeded
in doing the opposite.

One might ask "why" but an insightful
response is improbable

 

[Augustus]

Nope i argued that once source claims 400 million and you ran with it.

You, verbatim: "Before the muslim conquests the population of india is estimated at 600 million, after 200 million, a million deaths a year, feasible? Of course."

At the very least it shows you had absolutely no clue as to the population of India and thus the likelihood of your "conservative" 80 million being feasible.

As for my numbers a logical place to start is with as many history documents as i can find,

i.e one post of reddit that you plagiarised and passed off as your own 'research'

And i am getting rather fed up with you going over the same ground repeatedly. As i have asked before, provide irrefutable evidence, of your figures or we are done with this discussion.

Seems pointless as you just issue a Hovind challenge, while actually not dealing with any of the data presented, ignoring all questions and asserting random numbers as fact without even a shred of evidence.

Perhaps you can answer a general question regarding pre-modern historical enquiry in general though (hope springs eternal...)

As generalisations, are there any of the following you disagree with:

1. People writing about 'history' in pre-modern times were rarely trying to be objective, and many sources are more like propaganda (positive and negative) and hagiography. As such they should always be treated with great scepticism.
2. It is very easy to find sources which make historical claims that are certainly not true.
3. Writers generally had no ability to accurately calculate large numbers.
4. It was not really of great importance for them to accurately calculate large numbers anyway.
5. By critical analysis we can tell that many numbers in the past are implausibly high, from troop numbers, to populations to death tolls.
6. We would be right far more than we'd be wrong to assume that such numbers are generally significantly overstated unless we have clear evidence to the contrary.

 

[BilliardsBall]

Joshua never killed the Canaanites or destroyed their towns, but there are many verses in the Bible claiming he did.. So that was part of the religious belief.. I suspect God had NOTHING to do with it.

God commanded, “In the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 20:16-18).

Joshua and the people killed some of the people, destroyed some of the towns.

The Allies killed some of the people, destroyed some of the towns, while liberating Europe from Hitler and death camps.

I appreciate your heart against killing, however, killing is sometimes God-ordained, for just causes, Hitler/Canaanites. We can cite Canaanite excesses that seemingly surpass the Shoah!

 

[usfan]

Another "obvious" here is that while this forum
tries to be a friendly one, there was no such
intent in the OP.

The OP is an invidious attack on the
character and decency of a large percent
of this forum. Not to mention millions of others
unknown to any of us.

The OP has no evident intent to attempt to resolve
or improve anything, but has succeeded
in doing the opposite.

One might ask "why" but an insightful
response is improbable

ROFL!!!

there are COUNTLESS needling, demeaning, ridiculing threads and posts toward Christianity, ALL THE F**.. TIME! Friendly? Like this ad hom filled, hypocritical snipe? Implying this poster is a 'hater!' for not toeing the line with progressive Indoctrination?

So, do as you say, not as you do, is that it?


The absurdity with which progressives attack others, when they do the very things, is mind boggling. How can anyone be so detached from reason and reality?

/shakes head/