Dr. Aikman on an urban legend pushed by the “new atheists,” and one of their major blind spots:
Atheists who spend much of their time revisiting the crimes of religion ought to be quizzed again and again about what happens when governments adopt atheism as their official worldview.It is one of the most erroneous statements in popular culture in America, one of the most inaccurate but frequently repeated “urban legends,” that more people have been killed in wars of religion than any other kind of war.Wrong. If the entire list of victims of every religious war ever fought, from the Crusades, through the wars of religion in Europe after the Protestant Reformation, to the brutal attacks upon each other of Muslims and Hindus in the sub-continent of India is added up, that number is completely dwarfed by those murdered by Communist regimes in the twentieth century.According to some estimates, the number of people murdered under Communism, whether in wars started by Communist regimes, or as a result of internal repression against domestic adversaries, or in policies deliberately intended to produce starvation (Stalin’s holocaust in the Ukraine through starvation in 1933 murdered between seven and eleven million men, women, and children) approaches a total of 100 million.Then there is Hitler, who by general agreement deliberately murdered about twelve million people but started a war that took the lives of some 50 million. Hitler wasn’t technically an atheist – we’ll come to this in a moment –but there is no question that he acted as if there were no Divine personality or moral code above him to which he was going to be held accountable. In short, he certainly acted like someone in total rebellion against God.
150 million dead!
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In