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.
From "Atheism, not Religion, is the Real Killer" by Dinesh D'Souza, posted 11/29/07 at tothesource.com
In recent months, a spate of atheist books have argued that religion represents, as End of Faith author Sam Harris puts it, “the most potent source of human conflict, past and present.”
Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. “The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries.”
In his best-seller The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins contends that most of the world’s recent conflicts—in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, in Sri Lanka—show the vitality of religion’s murderous impulse.
The problem with this critique is that it exaggerates the crimes attributed to religion, while ignoring the greater crimes of secular fanaticism. The best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem Witch Trials. How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually, fewer than 25. Yet the event continues to haunt the liberal imagination.
It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the Crusaders’ and Inquisitors’ misdeeds of more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be around 5,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.
These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are miniscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the twentieth century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Josef 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.
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