The Christian Agenda Continues

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
221

Hey Brother Chris, I’ll ask you because pat, another devoted Catholic here, has totally distanced himself
from answering why he believes the 1917 ‘Miracle Of The Sun’ was a legitimate Holy event, and not a possible
satanic deception, because this was NEVER specifically prophesized, and Jesus never hinted one time in
Scripture that he would send his mother with ANY kind of extra-biblical message or event in the distant future, or
make the Sun dance in the sky for a special audience while others in Europe that had the very same Sun
shining down opon them that day in many other countries didn’t notice it, not to mention it would have been cosmologically impossible for the Sun to move in the sky for a fraction of the World’s population without anybody else in Europe witnessing anything unusual that day.

Why don’t people question these things?
What gives with this event? Why is it so venerated, and why did so many people fall for this likely
deception?
Do you believe this was from God? And if you do…why?
I actually believe in miracles Man, I really do…but this supposed legit event friggin’ stinks…something’s ‘off’
here, and I know you know it…what info does the Vatican have the WE don’t that makes them think this was
legit and not a deception?

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the events of Fatima. According to those who witnessed it, the Virgin Mary appeared to three children on October 13. Upwards of 70,000 people had waited for her appearance and the promised sign all morning. It had been raining all day and most of the people were soaked as they stood in the muddy field, waiting for something to happen. At one o’clock the children cried, “There she is!” They then knelt in front of the oak tree, as the apparition, which they alone could see, appeared to them. While this was occurring the much debated “Miracle of the Sun,” occurred. According to witnesses the sun descended from its place, in the sky and began to descend, pendulum like, toward earth. People who were there thought it was the end of the world. As the “sun” went slowly back to it place, people noticed that there clothes had been dried and others proclaimed that they had been healed of diseases.

Here’s what we need to keep in mind.

  1. NO ONE ever tested the spirit that appeared to the three children. This would have been very easy to do, just by asking the simple question, “Did Jesus come in the flesh?” Apparently this simple question drives the demons nuts and they can’t answer it, as they lie habitually. They usually tap dance around saying things like, “yes, He did, and he is also our brother.” Jesus is not the brother of the angels, good or fallen. Why didn’t anyone test the spirit of what was manifesting to the children?

  2. The apparition first said it was from heaven and pointed to the sky. It never told them it was the Mary of the Bible until much later.

  3. It communicated through telepathic means. This is greatly suspect, because in ALL of scripture angels speak in the language of the person they are appearing to. However it’s interesting to notein various worldwide ‘UFO abduction’ phenomena, telepathy is the choice of communication.

  4. Three secrets were given to the children and kept from the rest of the body of Christ…uhhh, no…This sets up a caste system in which only the select chosen few can know the “secret.” This is nothing short of occult manipulation, as the Gospel was NEVER censored and in fact the Apostle John wrote his letters to condemn the teachings of the Gnostics, who believed that there was more to the Gospel than the cross of Christ. There are NO SECRETS in the teachings of the Messiah…NONE.

  5. I have read were Catholic clergy who did not go along with the prevailing attitude that this was Mary and voiced their opinion that it might be a demonic deception! Bravo guys! However, they were silenced!

  6. Many of the witnesses at the event described what they saw as “a, dull, silver disc.”…wait a minute…TIME OUT,
    was it a silver ‘‘disc’’ or was it the Sun itself?

  7. There no photographs of this event…there are photo’s before and after but not during. Were the photo’s confiscated? Did the cameras all of a sudden stop working?

Address every one of these, please…thank you.
And please don’t get mad, Jesus was ‘challenged’ by the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount, and he didn’t get resentful.

222

[quote]Various people wrote:

Atheists have killed more people than all religious folks combined.[/quote]

Now that we have properly posed the question of which group helps the most widows and orphans, we must now properly pose the question of which group has [/i] created the most widows and orphans. An equally daunting task, but let’s have a go.

The problem, of course, is defining an atheist, but we’ve gnawed on that bone enough in this thread. I will, for the sake of argument, allow “atheist” to apply to the soldiers and secret police of Soviet Union and Communist China. I will even allow the Third Reich to join the club, despite all evidence that Hitler was a Neopagan Christian and the Nazis were for the most part very devout Catholics and Lutherans. Fuck it. Godless Commies and Heathen Nazis. Makes the narrative much simpler. Anybody else we want to add? I’ll give you Pol Pot, the Kim Il-Sung dynasty, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and all other Godless Commie Dictator since 1917. Why not.

Surely not Idi Amin. He was Muslim.

Surely not the Rwandans. They are Christian.

Surely not the Japanese. They are Buddhist and Shintoists, who believed that the Emperor was literally a divine descendant of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess who created the world.

Surely not Gengis Khan or his descendants, who were Tengrists, followers of Goktanri Dini, the “Sky God Religion”.

Surely not the various Chinese dynasties, as they were an amalgam of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism overlaid on native shamanism, animism and ancestor worship.

Surely not the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians, as they were pagans and polytheists.

We won’t waste time talking about how many people the Incas, the Mayans, the Toltecs, and our own aboriginal tribes had been killing for the millennia before they were contacted by Europeans, nor indeed about the internecine warfare that went on among the prehistoric peoples of Africa, Asia and Europe for tens of millennia before that. We have no census data or casualty lists of human sacrifices and inter-tribal warfare, though we know that it happened from archaeological and paleontological evidence. Also, we have no comprehensive data on the religious practices of these people, although we can extrapolate modern hunter-gatherer societies (the ones we haven’t wiped out, anyway), and surmise that these people were animist, shamanist, or some other species of paganism.

Not to mention the fact that I may just be talking to people who don’t believe in tens of millennia.

So. On Team Atheist, we have the Nazis and the Commies.

On Team Theist, we have everyone else: Christian, Jew, Muslim, and pagan alike.

And no equivocating over “well, that wasn’t the national religion of the country” or “well, they didn’t go to war in the name of…” No, no. We will have no double standards. Either Nazi Germany is a Christian country and the United States is an atheist country, or the other way around. One or the other. Pick one. If the atheists have to accept responsibility for the Holocaust, the Gulags, the Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields, then we everyone who is NOT an atheist has to accept responsibility for their killings, too.

Throughout the last six thousand years of recorded history.

We will only count political murder, which includes deaths resulting directly from war and deliberate genocide.

Deaths resulting from privation, starvation and disease do not count… Unless they happened in a concentration camp because… that was Nazis and stuff. Duh.

Still want to run the numbers?

Or by “atheist” do you only mean “people who don’t believe in my god”?

223

Oh just stop. You guys are going to end up arguing if every militant/military action ever was truly carried out for religious reasons, or for secular wants and needs (land, ore, lumber, etc.).

224

[quote]Brother Chris wrote:

That’s why we call it Christian Heresy, Islam is a reborn Arianism. [/quote]

I guess considering the subject, one could say that Arianism didn’t die and was resurrected, it just faked its death, saying in effect, “You heard me say, ‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”

…but then it DID come back, not three days later but three hundred years later.

:slight_smile:

225

I’m sorry if this has been addressed already…but are there any professing Christians here that believe people should be put to death for anything but murder/attempted murder, and possibly rape? Just wondering.

This stuff is honestly pretty confusing…I mean, in the Old Testament of course, you have God commanding his people to kill those of other faiths, going about the area conquering their enemies (people who believed in other gods), so it IS a little hard for me to swallow when it’s insisted that Christianity is “A peaceful faith”. Maybe it is now, but then again, should it be? God did declare himself to be a jealous God, so why is it not still considered good to kill those of opposing views?

Sure, Jesus didn’t go killing people, and preaching violence wasn’t really his thing, but is that supposed to mean Christianity no longer calls for the killing of people who believe in different gods? Now I realize that in the OT, it’s written that God would TELL his people directly to go attack X nation usually, but should we be expecting that to happen again today?

I guess you could say in a nutshell…what changed when Jesus came? Why did the attitude towards other religions seem to change?

226

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Various people wrote:

Atheists have killed more people than all religious folks combined.[/quote]

Now that we have properly posed the question of which group helps the most widows and orphans, we must now properly pose the question of which group has [/i] created the most widows and orphans. An equally daunting task, but let’s have a go.

The problem, of course, is defining an atheist, but we’ve gnawed on that bone enough in this thread. I will, for the sake of argument, allow “atheist” to apply to the soldiers and secret police of Soviet Union and Communist China. I will even allow the Third Reich to join the club, despite all evidence that Hitler was a Neopagan Christian and the Nazis were for the most part very devout Catholics and Lutherans. Fuck it. Godless Commies and Heathen Nazis. Makes the narrative much simpler. Anybody else we want to add? I’ll give you Pol Pot, the Kim Il-Sung dynasty, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and all other Godless Commie Dictator since 1917. Why not.

Surely not Idi Amin. He was Muslim.

Surely not the Rwandans. They are Christian.

Surely not the Japanese. They are Buddhist and Shintoists, who believed that the Emperor was literally a divine descendant of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess who created the world.

Surely not Gengis Khan or his descendants, who were Tengrists, followers of Goktanri Dini, the “Sky God Religion”.

Surely not the various Chinese dynasties, as they were an amalgam of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism overlaid on native shamanism, animism and ancestor worship.

Surely not the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians, as they were pagans and polytheists.

We won’t waste time talking about how many people the Incas, the Mayans, the Toltecs, and our own aboriginal tribes had been killing for the millennia before they were contacted by Europeans, nor indeed about the internecine warfare that went on among the prehistoric peoples of Africa, Asia and Europe for tens of millennia before that. We have no census data or casualty lists of human sacrifices and inter-tribal warfare, though we know that it happened from archaeological and paleontological evidence. Also, we have no comprehensive data on the religious practices of these people, although we can extrapolate modern hunter-gatherer societies (the ones we haven’t wiped out, anyway), and surmise that these people were animist, shamanist, or some other species of paganism.

Not to mention the fact that I may just be talking to people who don’t believe in tens of millennia.

So. On Team Atheist, we have the Nazis and the Commies.

On Team Theist, we have everyone else: Christian, Jew, Muslim, and pagan alike.

And no equivocating over “well, that wasn’t the national religion of the country” or “well, they didn’t go to war in the name of…” No, no. We will have no double standards. Either Nazi Germany is a Christian country and the United States is an atheist country, or the other way around. One or the other. Pick one. If the atheists have to accept responsibility for the Holocaust, the Gulags, the Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields, then we everyone who is NOT an atheist has to accept responsibility for their killings, too.

Throughout the last six thousand years of recorded history.

We will only count political murder, which includes deaths resulting directly from war and deliberate genocide.

Deaths resulting from privation, starvation and disease do not count… Unless they happened in a concentration camp because… that was Nazis and stuff. Duh.

Still want to run the numbers?

Or by “atheist” do you only mean “people who don’t believe in my god”?[/quote]

Yeah I am with you on this one Varqanir. There is absolutely no way that you could make the argument that throughout time or even in any individual century that Atheists are responsible for more deaths than beleivers. Almost every act of genocide or truly horrendous mass killing written about in a history book was performed by a believer of some god. Even if you are only going on the Judeao-Christian God then there is a pretty impressive list of bodies piled up in his name (and Varq was being kind by not including Hitler here).

You may could make the case that a lot of these people were not true believers and merely used the name of whatever deity to justify their heinous actions because “in the name of insert god” doesn’t seem to draw the same criticism as “because I want to”. And you could be partly right although many members of the Spanish inquisition would probably disagree with that strongly.

228

[quote]Sloth wrote:
Oh just stop. You guys are going to end up arguing if every militant/military action ever was truly carried out for religious reasons, or for secular wants and needs (land, ore, lumber, etc.).[/quote]

Precisely.

Whether you call it Lebensraum, Manifest Destiny, or some other term in Russian, Chinese, Latin or Greek, it all boils down to taking some other poor bastards’ stuff and wiping him out, while claiming legitimacy through appeals to divine right.

Same shit, different belt buckle.

230

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]jbpick86 wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Various people wrote:

Atheists have killed more people than all religious folks combined.[/quote]

Now that we have properly posed the question of which group helps the most widows and orphans, we must now properly pose the question of which group has [/i] created the most widows and orphans. An equally daunting task, but let’s have a go.

The problem, of course, is defining an atheist, but we’ve gnawed on that bone enough in this thread. I will, for the sake of argument, allow “atheist” to apply to the soldiers and secret police of Soviet Union and Communist China. I will even allow the Third Reich to join the club, despite all evidence that Hitler was a Neopagan Christian and the Nazis were for the most part very devout Catholics and Lutherans. Fuck it. Godless Commies and Heathen Nazis. Makes the narrative much simpler. Anybody else we want to add? I’ll give you Pol Pot, the Kim Il-Sung dynasty, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and all other Godless Commie Dictator since 1917. Why not.

Surely not Idi Amin. He was Muslim.

Surely not the Rwandans. They are Christian.

Surely not the Japanese. They are Buddhist and Shintoists, who believed that the Emperor was literally a divine descendant of Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess who created the world.

Surely not Gengis Khan or his descendants, who were Tengrists, followers of Goktanri Dini, the “Sky God Religion”.

Surely not the various Chinese dynasties, as they were an amalgam of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism overlaid on native shamanism, animism and ancestor worship.

Surely not the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians, as they were pagans and polytheists.

We won’t waste time talking about how many people the Incas, the Mayans, the Toltecs, and our own aboriginal tribes had been killing for the millennia before they were contacted by Europeans, nor indeed about the internecine warfare that went on among the prehistoric peoples of Africa, Asia and Europe for tens of millennia before that. We have no census data or casualty lists of human sacrifices and inter-tribal warfare, though we know that it happened from archaeological and paleontological evidence. Also, we have no comprehensive data on the religious practices of these people, although we can extrapolate modern hunter-gatherer societies (the ones we haven’t wiped out, anyway), and surmise that these people were animist, shamanist, or some other species of paganism.

Not to mention the fact that I may just be talking to people who don’t believe in tens of millennia.

So. On Team Atheist, we have the Nazis and the Commies.

On Team Theist, we have everyone else: Christian, Jew, Muslim, and pagan alike.

And no equivocating over “well, that wasn’t the national religion of the country” or “well, they didn’t go to war in the name of…” No, no. We will have no double standards. Either Nazi Germany is a Christian country and the United States is an atheist country, or the other way around. One or the other. Pick one. If the atheists have to accept responsibility for the Holocaust, the Gulags, the Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields, then we everyone who is NOT an atheist has to accept responsibility for their killings, too.

Throughout the last six thousand years of recorded history.

We will only count political murder, which includes deaths resulting directly from war and deliberate genocide.

Deaths resulting from privation, starvation and disease do not count… Unless they happened in a concentration camp because… that was Nazis and stuff. Duh.

Still want to run the numbers?

Or by “atheist” do you only mean “people who don’t believe in my god”?[/quote]

Yeah I am with you on this one Varqanir. There is absolutely no way that you could make the argument that throughout time or even in any individual century that Atheists are responsible for more deaths than beleivers. Almost every act of genocide or truly horrendous mass killing written about in a history book was performed by a believer of some god. Even if you are only going on the Judeao-Christian God then there is a pretty impressive list of bodies piled up in his name (and Varq was being kind by not including Hitler here).

You may could make the case that a lot of these people were not true believers and merely used the name of whatever deity to justify their heinous actions because “in the name of insert god” doesn’t seem to draw the same criticism as “because I want to”. And you could be partly right although many members of the Spanish inquisition would probably disagree with that strongly. [/quote]

Go ahead. Top 100 million. See if you can get it done. I’ll wait.[/quote]

I will work on this tomo. I have to say goodbye for now.

231

Enough of this pissing contest on who’s responsible for more deaths because that shit
can ping pong indefinitely with no satisfying answers or convincing from either side, lest
some fucking theoretical hi-tech ‘time window’ to the past is invented to verify or debunk whatever
argument one wants to win.

Karado, cutting through the Mustard again…I like a little Grey Poupon on a soft warm bagel after a
moderate natural THC session, while 30 million+ Americans, (including many ‘‘Christians’’) go through Doctor/pharmaceutical route
of man made ways to de-stress.

‘‘Sorcery’’ in the Bible is ‘‘Pharmakia’’ in the Greek, which is the root word for Pharmaceuticals BTW… The Man made drugs
is ‘‘Sorcery’’, not the natural herb.

Stay thirsty my friends.

232

[quote]pittbulll wrote:

I could buy some truths are unknowable , It is the truth that the sun has risen everyday in our lives and it has set every evening [/quote]

I don’t have to tell you that the sun doesn’t set and rise. Those words are the convenient artifact of a geocentric ideology. No more true or false than Apollo’s Chariot.

You might say, ‘You know what I mean!’, but that’s the crux of the whole thing, isn’t it?

233

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:
Your “facts” in these discussions, are nothing more than biased correlations, and not “facts” at all. It’s telling of your religious bias in that you do not attribute these atrocities to statism, socialism, communism, etc.; rather you and all of your apologist christian friends choose to tack it onto the face of atheism instead. Why? well, as I’ve already said, you NEED these to be atheist atrocities in order to water down the the horrific atrocities that have been carried out since forever in the name of some god or another. Well, guess what,patty cakes, blind faith in an ideology (and the head of that ideology) is what kills, not the secular/atheistic ideals of free inquiry, skepticism, and the pursuit if ideas for their own sake. [/quote]

And I could flip that around insert the word Christian and say the same thing about you.
Fact: The USSR had a state policy of Atheism[/quote]

So? Doesn’t mean that their driving force was atheism. Put your thinking cap on, and try to think about what some of the driving factors of Stalin and the USSR was.

[quote]pat wrote:
Fact: The communists murdered millions of Christians and other religious because they consider them a political threat and a violation of the state policy.[/quote]

Correct.

Do you think that the priests/church leaders were just benign followers of christ? LOL…or that they were also influential leaders with their hands in the politics of the day? Now, knowing that they were politically active, and wielded influence among the people, why would a power hungry statist, demanding total allegiance to none other than the state, want to get rid of such people and their institutions? Hmmmm, think…

[quote]pat wrote:
Fact: Atheists have murdered more people than any other demographic in the history of the world.[/quote]

LOL…not a “fact” at all. You and all your christian friends love throwing this unsupported claim around, yet it still remains untrue. How “atheist” these atheists you like to claim were, BTW, is still up for debate. But even so, just because they were atheists, does not automatically follow that they did what they did in the NAME of atheism.

Hitler and Stalin also had mustaches; did they kill in the name of mustache?

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:
If your argument held any water at all, then the most atheistic countries of Scandinavia wouldn’t have the highest standard of living in the world, highest equality, literacy, longevity, low crime, female political participation, etc. If you were right, then Norway and Sweden should be invading countries and occupying them with the regularity of the Olympic games, with troops and basses around the globe and drones killing innocent women and children.
[/quote]

Scandinavia? Who the fuck is talking about Scandinavia? You’re reaching, badly. This is known as a Red Herring.[/quote]

Not reaching at all. This is relevant to the conversation because you’re claiming that atheism is what drove the evil that was done by those regimes. I’ve shown you nations that are majority atheist, and are doing very well; better than the majority christian US in many categories. These nations are some of the most peaceful on this planet, but how can that be? they’re so, ATHEIST!?

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]bigflamer wrote:
You could end this argument RIGHT NOW, if only you would point out which regime has ever said “There is no God, therefore do this”. Oh, and here’s a protip; don’t try to include Hitler, as the Nazi Party retained strong ties with the Roman Catholic church (there were plenty of crosses about with swastikas on them) and Hitler even saw Jesus as a role model for recognizing the Jews as enemies.

[/quote]

Considering they murdered 4 million Catholics in those camps, your revisionist history is a fail. In the beginning of the regime, they were somewhat Catholic friendly that ended with the mass round up of Polish priests who were subsequently murdered.

Or I could just say, here we go again, the same old tired worn out arguments repeated over and over and over and over again. Cause that really makes a point.[/quote]

Not revisionist history at all, but methinks you know that. And you’re still failing to point me in the direction of a regime, JUST ONE, that did what they did in the name of “no god”. Just ONE that said “there is no god, therefore do this”. Just ONE that had as their driving force, the position of “there is no god”.

So stop fucking around, Pat, and get to it. Prove me wrong and show me this regime. Take all the time you need.

234

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
…Ironic, though, for a Catholic to be excommunicated from an ostensibly atheist organization… for heresy.[/quote]

I’ve been preaching this sermon (that atheism is a religion) for so many years in your absence.

You could hardly believe the screeching and caterwauling from the opposition. It was deafening at times. I had to wear earplugs.
[/quote]

And my favorite sport is “not golfing”. I quite literally, do not golf all the damn time. I love “not golfing”; best sport ever…

235

Here’s a few to start off with. Didn’t go earlier than the 13th century, nor later than the early 20th. This is only wars. No deliberate pogroms, famines or genocides in this list. I can always add them in if objections to any of the small number of conflicts I selected becomes too shrill.

There really have been an awful lot of wars. I didn’t bother with all the dinky little skirmishes of less than 2 million, and stayed away from the really big old inter-dynastic wars where it was just a bunch of Chinese people killing other Chinese people. First off, it would have gone way over 100 million with only three wars, and everyone would accuse me of padding the figures by over representing the Taoist/Buddhist/Conficianists, which I know someone would inevitably say “well they don’t really believe in, like, a REAL god and stuff…” So I avoided the issue. I am keeping Attila and Genghis. Sky God Religion all the way.

I didn’t count any war past the first world war. First because there was no need to but also because once I got to World War II I realized what a pain in the ass it would be to calculate how many of the Team Atheist casualties were members of Team Atheist killed by Team Theist, and how many were killed by their fellow Atheists fighting for the other side. Don’t worry, Team Atheist still gets credit for the Holocaust, and I also didn’t get to count the Rape of Nanking and Japan’s other jolly adventures in East and Southeast Asia, nor the bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Berlin. So if Team Theist’s numbers seem a little low, that’s why.

I also didn’t list the Inquisition or the Crusades, because bringing up the Inquisition and the Crusades to demonstrate the violence of religion a cliche almost as tired and threadbare as holding Nazi Germany up as an example of an atheist regime.

So here we go. It’s a good start. And there’s plenty of iceberg left if the tip doesn’t satisfy.

Conquests by Mongols (Sky God Religion) 30-70 million
Conquests by Huns (Sky God Religion): 2.5-4 million
Conquests by Tamerlane (Islam): 15-20 million
Muslim Conquest of India (Islam): 50-70 million
Reconquista (Roman Catholic, Islam) 7 million
Thirty Years War (Roman Catholic , Protestant) 3-11 million
French Wars of Religion (Roman Catholic, Protestant): 3 million
Second Northern War (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Protestant): 3 million
Napoleonic Wars (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Protestant): 3.5-6 million
Conquest of Menelik of Ethiopia (Ethiopian Orthodox): 5 million
First World War (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Islam, Shinto-Buddhist, Protestant): 15-35 million.

Obviously, it’s impossible to know exactly how many people died in each conflict, and estimates vary widely depending on the sources you use. Using the lowest figure, I come up with 137 million. The high estimate total is 234 million.

How fucking depressing.

237

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Here’s a few to start off with. Didn’t go earlier than the 13th century, nor later than the early 20th. This is only wars. No deliberate pogroms, famines or genocides in this list. I can always add them in if objections to any of the small number of conflicts I selected becomes too shrill.

There really have been an awful lot of wars. I didn’t bother with all the dinky little skirmishes of less than 2 million, and stayed away from the really big old inter-dynastic wars where it was just a bunch of Chinese people killing other Chinese people. First off, it would have gone way over 100 million with only three wars, and everyone would accuse me of padding the figures by over representing the Taoist/Buddhist/Conficianists, which I know someone would inevitably say “well they don’t really believe in, like, a REAL god and stuff…” So I avoided the issue. I am keeping Attila and Genghis. Sky God Religion all the way.

I didn’t count any war past the first world war. First because there was no need to but also because once I got to World War II I realized what a pain in the ass it would be to calculate how many of the Team Atheist casualties were members of Team Atheist killed by Team Theist, and how many were killed by their fellow Atheists fighting for the other side. Don’t worry, Team Atheist still gets credit for the Holocaust, and I also didn’t get to count the Rape of Nanking and Japan’s other jolly adventures in East and Southeast Asia, nor the bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki and Berlin. So if Team Theist’s numbers seem a little low, that’s why.

I also didn’t list the Inquisition or the Crusades, because bringing up the Inquisition and the Crusades to demonstrate the violence of religion a cliche almost as tired and threadbare as holding Nazi Germany up as an example of an atheist regime.

So here we go. It’s a good start. And there’s plenty of iceberg left if the tip doesn’t satisfy.

Conquests by Mongols (Sky God Religion) 30-70 million
Conquests by Huns (Sky God Religion): 2.5-4 million
Conquests by Tamerlane (Islam): 15-20 million
Muslim Conquest of India (Islam): 50-70 million
Reconquista (Roman Catholic, Islam) 7 million
Thirty Years War (Roman Catholic , Protestant) 3-11 million
French Wars of Religion (Roman Catholic, Protestant): 3 million
Second Northern War (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Protestant): 3 million
Napoleonic Wars (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Protestant): 3.5-6 million
Conquest of Menelik of Ethiopia (Ethiopian Orthodox): 5 million
First World War (Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Islam, Shinto-Buddhist, Protestant): 15-35 million.

Obviously, it’s impossible to know exactly how many people died in each conflict, and estimates vary widely depending on the sources you use. Using the lowest figure, I come up with 137 million. The high estimate total is 234 million.

How fucking depressing.

[/quote]

Actually, no matter how these numbers come out, you need to adjust them for the following:

  • Amount of people alive at the time
    I could kill 100 million people now and 100 million people 2000 years ago and the damage to the human race would be on an entirely different scale.

  • Access to technology
    2000 years ago, there were no guns, no ballistic missiles, just the good old bow and arrow, spear, and sword. Also bare fists (with a side of mustache). I could kill more people now in minutes than I could have even 500 years ago in a lifetime.

These adjustments are necessary to ascertain the actual effects, since variables change. There’s a reason we sayA New Hope is the most successful movie to date despite only bringing in $221 million in its initial gross earnings, whereas fucking Transformers III made $402 million.

I’m sorry, I’m still very angry about Transformers 2 and Transformers 3. So much wasted potential.

240

The idea that atheism is the defining feature and thus, ipso facto, the cause of Communist regime death tolls is about as laughable as claiming the Rwandan genocide or Mongolian conquest was due to their religious beliefs.

If we wanted a truly accurate pissing contest, the ambit would have to be 'which conflicts/wars were a direct consequence of adherence or non-adherence to a religion?"

And in answer to that I struggle to come up with any examples.

Take the Northern Irish conflict for instance, whilst prima facie a Protestant vs Catholic conflict, calling it a ‘religious war’ would be absolutely erroneous in light of the political history of that region.