"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." (Joseph Stalin)
According to Gore Vidal, "the great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture is monotheism". A British journalist countered Bush by claiming that the "real axis of evil" is "Judaism, Christianity and Islam".
"Only the wilfully blind fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities of the world today," says Richard Dawkins in A Devil's Chaplain.
However, as Os Guinness reminds us, "Whatever our personal views of religion, this statement is factually wrong, and its lazy repetition seriously distorts public debate and endangers democratic freedom. Its root is an unexamined enlightenment prejudice that reduces faith to its functions and recognises only the worst contributions of faith".
The fact is that more than 100 million human beings were killed by secularist regimes and ideologies in the last century.
An honest analysis of modern massacres and genocide from the Young Turks through Stalin and Mao Tse-tung to Pol Pot, reveals a fact that is often omitted in discussions in the West: "More people in the 20th century were killed by secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals in the name of secularist ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions in Western history."
– ADRIAN SOBERS
Source: The Nation Newspaper | Religion is not to blame
One sad fact is that 1) Adrian is obviously wrong and 2) we can't possibly know the number of deaths attributed to everything organized religion had its hand in. The Inquisitions by far, more than likely, has been the most egregious and atrocious institutional genocide committed in the name of God. Not to mention the Catholic Church virtually wiped out the very rich culture of the Celts. What's even more sad, I believe this was done in the name of God for greed. The Roman Empire was crumbling and the various native "pagans" were the new targets of empire.
It's the twentieth century. Record keeping is better now than in the good old days of vellum, so it's only understandable that we have some reliable numbers regarding deaths anywhere.
