One of the most favorite arguments against Christianity is based on the idea of shaming Jesus and his message because of us who claim to be his followers. The argument is usually worded as such:
More people have been killed by Christians in the name of God than for any other reason.
Here is a quote from John E. Remsburg:
"The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused."People whose arguments such as these really think that the Crusades, Inquisitions, the European religious Civil Wars, and persecutions by Christians in the name of God have killed more people than secular and totalitarian governments. This simply is not true. If you add up the 2000 years of Christian history and estimate the number of deaths due to atrocities committed in God's name you get 17 million! However if you do the same for agnostic/atheistic atrocities for just the 20th century, you get 1,128,000,000 people! That is about for every one person killed by a Christian, 66 were killed by atheists!
In presenting this I'm not trying to say that the atrocities committed during the crusades, inquisition, or witch burning is okay or better than say the Nazi Holocaust or Stalin's purge because less people died. No. God is going to hold all perpetrators accountable. It's all evil. However, to say that Christianity is responsible for the most deaths is simply not true.
Isn't religion to blame for most of history's killings?
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I'm curoius how you're counting that, since despite the fact that I don't believe the Nazis were Christians, they often claimed to be serving a Christian cause. The fact is, if you discount anyone who claimed to be a Christian but didn't act in a very Christian manner, you're going to discount just about every killing, which misses the point of the (albeit specious) argument. I would say that virtually nobody was ever killed by Christians for a truly Christian cause, but in the last 1,900 years, it was a common excuse for killings that were really politically motivated.
ReplyDeleteThe Nazis do not count because they did not try to say that God told told them to do whgat they did. They exterminated people because they deemed them unworthy of life. And I would agree with what you said about nobody has ever been murdered by a Christian because the murderer was acting out what it m3eans to be a Christians. This list includes the deaths from the crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, civil wars, and the cases where people killed others because they thought that they were doing the will of the Christian God. This argument is far form new.
ReplyDeleteThe Encyclopedia of Wars (New York: Facts on File, 2005) was compiled by nine history professors who specifically conducted research for the text for a decade in order to chronicle 1,763 wars. The survey of wars covers a time span from 8000 BC to 2003 AD. From over 10,000 years of war 123, which is 6.98 percent, are considered to have been religious wars.
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