On This Page SECULARISM – THE MOST EVIL PHILOSOPHY KNOWN TO HUMAN GOVERNMENT
Five examples which amount to very powerful evidence that it is God-denying Secularism which has caused more violence and suffering than anything else in history. DOES RELIGION KILL?
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. Please Note: Each coloured link within all the articles will lead you to a related topic on a different page of this site. However while the text is part of the original article, the links are not. The authors of these articles may or may not agree with the views expressed on those pages, or anything else on this site.. 
The Real Murderers.. Atheism Or Christianity?
Is it legitimate to condemn religion for historical atrocities? First we had better examine the facts.
I got a call from a gentleman from San Francisco who was exercised about Christian missionaries going into foreign lands. Then he started talking about not only the destruction of indigenous beliefs, but also the destruction of missionaries. That's what he wanted to see happen. He also said that Christians and religious groups are responsible for the greatest massacres of history. It turns out he was quite supportive of Wicca and indigenous religions which worship the Mother Earth force, Gaia. This is essentially the basic foundation for witchcraft. The assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them. But a couple of the things that he said were a challenge to me. Not only did he assert that historically missionaries have destroyed cultures and indigenous religions at the point of a gun, but also Christians and religion were responsible for most of the bloodshed in the world, or the great majority of it. I've heard this claim before. I wanted to respond with more detail because I'm sure you've heard these things as well. I have a tactic that I employ in situations like this that is called "Just the Facts, Ma'am." In other words, there are times when you're faced with objections to Christianity or your point of view that really fail with an accurate assessment of the facts. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them. The assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. The greatest atrocities committed against man were done in the name of God. Before I get to the particular facts, there is more than just a factual problem here. There is a theoretical problem as well and I tried to make the point that we must distinguish between what an individual or group of people do and what the code that they allegedly follow actually asserts. The fact is that there are people who do things consistently that are inconsistent with the code that they allegedly follow. But often times when that happens, especially where religion is concerned, the finger is pointed not at the individual who is choosing to do something barbaric, but at the code he claims to represent. The only time it's legitimate to point to the code as the source of barbarism is if the code is, in fact, the source of barbarism. People object to a religion that used barbaric means to spread the faith. But one can only use that as an objection against the religion if it's the religion itself that asserts that one must do it this way, as opposed to people who try to promote the spread of the religion in a forceful fashion in contradiction to what the religion actually teaches. It's my understanding that much of Islam has been spread by the edge of the sword. That isn't because Muslim advocates were particularly violent. It's because their religion actually advocates this kind of thing. The difference between that and Christianity is that when Christianity was spread by the edge of the sword it was done so in contradistinction to the actually teachings of Christianity. This is when individual people who claim to be Christians actually did things that were inconsistent with their faith. See Is Islam Peaceful or Militant? I've had some people that have told me when I've brought this up, "That's not a fair defense. You can't simply say that those people who committed the Crusades or the Inquisition or the witch burnings weren't real Christians. That's illegitimate." My response is, why? We know what a real Christian is. A real Christian is someone who believes particular things and lives a particular kind of lifestyle. John makes it clear that those who consistently live unrighteously are ipso facto by definition not part of the faith. So why is it illegitimate for me to look at people who claim to be Christians, yet live unrighteous lives, and promote genocide to say that these people aren't living consistently with the text, therefore you can't really call them Christians. I think that's legitimate.
It's not fair or reasonable to fault the Bible when the person who's waving the sword is doing things that are contradictory to what the Bible teaches.
For example, no one would fault the Hippocratic Oath, which is a very rigid standard of conduct for physicians, just because there are doctors who don't keep it. We wouldn't say there's something wrong with the oath, the code that they allegedly follow. We'd say there was something wrong with the individuals who don't live up to the ideals of that code. That is the case frequently where people waving the Bible in one hand are also waving a bloody sword in the other. The two are inconsistent. So it's not fair or reasonable to fault the Bible when the person who's waving the sword is doing things that are contradictory to what the Bible teaches ought to be done. So that's the first important thing to remember when you face an objection like this. Distinguish between what a person does and what the code they claim to follow actually asserts. Christianity is one thing, and if we're going to fault Christianity we must fault its teachings and not fault it because there are people who say they are Christians but then live a life that is totally morally divergent from what Christianity actually teaches. As I said earlier, this kind of objection falls when you employ a tactic I call "Just the Facts, Ma'am," and I'd like to give you some of those facts. My assertion as I responded to the gentleman who called last week was simply this: it is true that there are Christians who do evil things. Even take people's lives. This is an indication that these people aren't truly Christians, but it may be true also that people with the right heart, but the wrong head do things that are inappropriate, like I think might have been the case in the Salem Witch Trials. My basic case is that religion doesn't promote this kind of thing; it's the exception to the rule. The rule actually is that when we remove God from the equation, when we act and live as if we have no one to answer to but ourselves, and if there is no God, then the rule of law is social Darwinism-- the strong rule the weak. We'll find that, quite to the contrary, it is not Christianity and the belief in the God of the Bible that results in carnage and genocide. But it's when people reject the God of the Bible that we are most vulnerable to those kinds of things that we see in history that are the radical and gross destruction of human lives.
Now for the facts.
Let's take the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Apparently, between June and September of 1692 five men and fourteen women were eventually convicted and hanged because English law called for the death penalty for witchcraft (which, incidentally, was the same as the Old Testament). During this time there were over 150 others that were imprisoned. Things finally ended in September 1692 when Governor William Phipps dissolved the court because his wife had been accused. He said enough of this insanity. It was the colony's leading minister, by the way, who finally ended the witch hunt in 1693 and those that remained in prison were released. The judge that was presiding over the trials publicly confessed his guilt in 1697. By the way , it's interesting to note that this particular judge was very concerned about the plight of the American Indian and was opposed to slavery. These are views that don't sit well with the common caricature of the radical Puritans in the witch hunt. In 1711 the colony's legislatures made reparation to the heirs of the victims. They annulled the convictions. I guess the point is that there was a witch hunt. It was based on theological reasons, but it wasn't to the extent that is usually claimed. I think last week the caller said it was millions and millions that were burned at the stake as witches. That certainly wasn't the case in this country. It seemed that the witch hunt was a result of theological misapplication and the people who were involved were penitent. The whole witch hunt lasted only a year. Sixteen people were hanged in New England for witchcraft prior to 1692. In the 1692 witch hunt nineteen were executed. So you've got thirty-five people. One hundred fifty imprisoned. This is not at all to diminish or minimize the impact of the American witch hunts which resulted in thirty-five deaths. But thirty-five is not millions. It is not hundreds of thousands. It's not even hundreds. It's thirty-five. This was not genocide. Now in Europe it was a little different. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft in 1431. Over a period of 300 years, from 1484 to 1782, the Christian church put to death 300,000 women accused of witchcraft, about 1000 per year. Again, I don't want to minimize the impact of 1000 lives lost a year, but here we're talking about a much, much smaller number over a long period of time than what has been claimed in the past. In America we're talking thirty-five people. In Europe over 300 years, we're talking about 300,000. Not millions. The sources here are World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana . You can also read in Newsweek , August 31, 1992. I was accused of being a liar last week. I'm trying to give you the facts from reputable sources that show that the accusations from last week aren't accurate. There were two Inquisitions. One of them began right around the end of the first millennium in 1017. It began as an attempt to root out heretics and occurred chiefly in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The Spanish Inquisition followed in the fourteenth century and was much bloodier. It began as a feudal aristocracy which forced religious values on society. Jews were caught in the middle of this and many of them were killed. About 2000 executions took place. The Inquisition that took place at the turn of the millennium, less than that. So we're talking about thousands of people, not millions. There were actually seven different Crusades and tens of thousands died in them. Most of them were a misdirected attempt to free the Holy Land. Some weren't quite like that. There were some positive aspects to them, but they were basically an atrocity over a couple hundred years. The worst was the Children's Crusade. All of the children who went to fight died along the way. Some were shipwrecked and the rest were taken into slavery in Egypt.
A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religion criminals have committed. My point is not that Christians or religious people aren't vulnerable to committing terrible crimes. Certainly they are. But it is not religion that produces these things; it is the denial of Biblical religion that generally leads to these kinds of things. The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination. My source is The Guinness Book of World Records. Look up the category "Judicial" and under the subject of "Crimes: Mass Killings," the greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against the government of another is 26.3 million Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse Tung between the years of 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32 and 61.7 million people. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Figaro magazine on November 5, 1978. In the U.S.S.R. the Nobel Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimates the loss of life from state repression and terrorism from October 1917 to December 1959 under Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev at 66.7 million. Finally, in Cambodia (and this was close to me because I lived in Thailand in 1982 working with the broken pieces of the Cambodian holocaust from 1975 to 1979) "as a percentage of a nation's total population, the worst genocide appears to be that in Cambodia, formerly Kampuchea. According to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, more than one third of the eight million Khmer were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979. One third of the entire country was put to death under the rule of Pol Pot, the founder of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. During that time towns, money and property were abolished. Economic execution by bayonet and club was introduced for such offenses as falling asleep during the day, asking too many questions, playing non-communist music, being old and feeble, being the offspring of an undesirable, or being too well educated. In fact, deaths in the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in Phnom Penh, which is the capitol of Kampuchea, reached 582 in a day." Then in Chinese history of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries there were three periods of wholesale massacre. The numbers of victims attributed to these events are assertions rather than reliable estimates. The figures put on the Mongolian invasion of northern China form 1210 to 1219 and from 1311 to 1340 are both on the order of 35 million people. While the number of victims of bandit leader Chang Hsien-Chung, known as the Yellow Tiger, from 1643 to 1647 in the Szechwan province has been put at 40 million people. China under Mao Tse Tung, 26.3 million Chinese. According the Walker Report, 63.7 million over the whole period of time of the Communist revolution in China. Solzhenitsyn says the Soviet Union put to death 66.7 million people. Kampuchea destroyed one third of their entire population of eight million Cambodians. The Chinese at two different times in medieval history, somewhere in the vicinity of 35 million and 40 million people. Ladies and gentlemen, make note that these deaths were the result of organizations or points of view or ideologies that had left God out of the equation. None of these involve religion. And all but the very last actually assert atheism.
Religion, and Biblical religion in particular, is a mitigator of evil in the world.
It seems to me that my colleague Dennis Prager's illustration cannot be improved upon to show the self-evident capability of Biblical religion to restrain evil. He asks this in this illustration. If you were walking down a dark street at night in the center of Los Angeles and you saw ten young men walking towards you, would you feel more comfortable if you knew that they had just come from a Bible class? Of course, the answer is certainly you would. That demonstrates that religion, and Biblical religion in particular, is a mitigator of evil in the world. It is true that it's possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail it produces evil because the individual people are actually living in a rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it can produce it, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We're talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. ©2002 Gregory Koukl Reproduction permitted for non-commercial use only. [TOP OF PAGE]
SECULARISM – THE MOST EVIL PHILOSOPHY KNOWN TO HUMAN GOVERNMENT Secularism: The belief that religion should have no place in civil affairs. Modern Western Secularism: The banning of Christianity from as much of modern life as possible.
A man I worked with back in the 1960s used to say, It became somewhat fashionable during the 20th century to claim that the most wicked governments in human history were governments with a religious (usually a Christian) agenda. This claim – totally unsubstantiated by the facts – started to be heard everywhere, especially, of course, among liberals and socialists, and atheists often threw this claim at believers. The true facts are rather different, indeed, quite dramatically different. I want to give five examples which amount to very powerful evidence that it is God-denying Secularism which has caused more violence and suffering than anything else in history.
1. The French Republic.
It is sometimes forgotten that the French revolution held a very strong anti-church and anti-clerical agenda (apart from its obvious anti-aristocratic motivation). Post-revolution, The French murdered about one million of their own people; often this was without trial or after a 'trial' which can only be called cruel, shambolic and cynical in the extreme. The revolutionaries may have considered the French monarchy somewhat unresponsive and uncaring towards the masses (in fact, the French king had refused to use force against his opponents), but this would prove 'small fry' compared to the wholesale slaughter which followed that revolution. Indeed, in the end the guillotine could not handle the multitudes accounted worthy for slaughter, and mass drowning was employed as a tool of execution. No historian worthy of his salt doubts that many thousands died as a result of that revolution simply because they were the victims of envy, greed and jealousy!
Today it is often claimed that the French Republic was the first truly modern government and the first truly liberal government – in fact it was totalitarian, despotic, often lawless and it raged with a hatred of Christianity and a callous disregard for human life. Moreover, it was this revolution which encouraged people like Marx and Lenin and, yes, Hitler too in their evil designs. How come? Because what happened in France in 1789 showed these 20th century despots how a formerly stable society could be radically – and quite rapidly - changed by the will of the masses when those masses are fed a continual diet of the ideologically appropriate philosophy; the message of France was: get the propaganda right, then find a way of feeding that to the masses and anything becomes possible! Late 18th century France was their 'blueprint.'
2. Nazism and Communism.
In the 20th century alone, more people were slaughtered under secularist governments and in the name of secularist ideologies, such as Nazism and communism, than in all the religious persecutions within western history combined! Most people know that Hitler killed 6,000,000 Jews alone (that is, apart from the other groups which his henchmen slaughtered on a vast scale, including Poles), what is probably far less well-known is that as many as 110-120 million people have been killed by communism alone – in eastern Europe, Africa, Central and South America, southeast Asia and China (the true figures for the massacres and governmentally-caused famines of the Chinese 'Cultural Revolution' and 'Great Leap Forward', for example, are only just emerging and historians have been stunned. Anything from ten to forty million people perished in China).
3. The Spanish Inquisition.
But what of the Spanish Inquisition? It has been claimed that this was one of the greatest evils in European history and that this was an act of Christianity. But what is the truth? I am not going to apologize for things carried out in Roman Catholic countries and one can never excuse torture but I think we should always strive for the truth; Many of us have long suspected that some of the figures hysterically quoted for this “Christian outrage” may be wildly exaggerated; some of the sects as well as some of us Protestants have been guilty here. Two books now give us much greater information on this, Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition and The Inquisition, edited by Brenda Stalcup. In referring to these sources, J.P. Holding writes this,
'Kamen reports that the threat of the Spanish Inquisition has been particularly overblown. Without minimizing the atrocities that were committed, it is nevertheless a fact that many Skeptical sites (relying at times on Helen Ellerbee, a notoriously unreliable source) frame the Spanish Inquisition particularly as one might elsewhere frame Mao's Great Leap Forward. Kamen [K60, 203] notes that, "Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1530, it is unlikely that more than two thousand people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition....for most of its existence that Inquisition was far from being a juggernaut of death either in intention or in capability." By Kamen's estimate, for example, "it would seem that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fewer than three people a year were executed in the whole of the Spanish monarchy from Sicily to Peru, certainly a lower rate than in any provincial court of justice in Spain or anywhere else in Europe." [K203] This was weighted against people of Jewish and Muslim origin, but let it never be said that the numbers themselves are anything to be flabbergasted about. It is also notable that the impetus for the Inquisition in Spain came first not from the church, but from the king and queen of Spain who asked for an Inquisition to be conducted.' (Quoted from 'Were You Expecting It?' by J.P. Holding. The full article is HERE
4. Witch Hunting.
Somewhat associated with the Inquisition, but also separate in many ways was the issue of 'witch-hunting.' Horrendous death figures have been claimed for this by people like Carl Sagan in their eagerness to pick on an example of 'Christian atrocities.' But in recent years the issue of withcraft has been examined more carefully and the claimed death figures have been greatly revised. Even in 1928 Montague Summers attacked the belief that many witches were burned at the stake in England as "erroneous" and "ignorant" (source: page133, Six Modern Myths by Philip J. Sampson, Inter-Vasity, 2000). "Millions" have somewhat hysterically been claimed to have been put to death as witches by people like Sagan in their eagerness to attack Christianity. As Sampson has pointed out, more recent and better-researched estimates put the figure closer to 150-300 people per year throughout Europe and North America, perhaps somewhere around 60,000 over 300 years. Of course, this cannot be excused but it is wrong to exaggerate and over-embellish the figures. (For any wanting more information on this in a most concise form I can recommend Philip Sampson's book, Six Modern Myths, chapter six, ISBN 0-85111-659-0).
5. The Second World War.
Some have given the Second World War as an example of Christian outrages resulting in millions of deaths but this is a very poor example which can be very quickly refuted! Lets look at this:
The claim is that both Great Britain and the United States on the one hand and Germany on the other hand were 'Christian nations.' But the Nazi party had negated the authority of the German Lutheran Church and the sincere godly pastors were imprisoned; thereafter the Nazis embarked on their road of bloodshed and genocide. Only the pastors who were willing to respect National Socialism were allowed to continue. Hitler and Minister for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels made a determined effort to provide the German people with another ideology and another philosophy to replace the former widespread respect which Germans had held for Christianity. Moreover, continual propaganda sought to undermine Christianity and to encourage respect for Nordic and teutonic pagan mythologies. So, in embarking on their evil and doomed path, the Germany of 1939-1945 cannot be considered a “Christian nation.” However, it was two Christian nations in particular, Great Britain and the United States (plus several other 'Christian nation' allies including Australia, Canada and New Zealand) which were determined to stand up to Hitler's despotism – so this is actually a very strong argument for the moral integrity of Christianity! It was the world's major Christian nations who felt that Hitler could not be allowed to get away with his hideous outrages forever and that some sacrifices were necessary in order to defeat him!! So I maintain that the popular 20th century argument of liberals and socialists that the most cruel and despotic governments and movements have always been “religious” or “Christian” in philosophy can quite easily be demonstrated to be a complete and utter nonsense; it is governments which have rejected Christianity and strongly promoted other atheistic ideologies which have led to the enslavement and destruction of millions. Secularism (in its many forms) when adopted by human government is a killer! Copyright Robin A. Brace, 2005. UK Apologetics [TOP OF PAGE] Sources.
(Please note: Sources are not necessarily recommended books in all cases).
Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution. IndyPublish.com, 2002.
Hansen, C. Witchcraft at Salem. London: Arrow, 1970.
Levack, BP. Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe. Vol III, 1992.
Holding, JP. Were You Expecting It? (Online essay here: http://www.tektonics.org/qt/spaninq.html)
Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition, 1997.
Midelfort, HCE. Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany 1562-1684. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Purkiss, D. The Witch in History. London: Routledge, 1996.
Roberts, J M. The French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Sagan, C. The Demon Haunted World. London: Hooder, 1996.
Sampson, PJ. Six Modern Myths. Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000.
Stalcup, Brenda. The Inquisition. California: Greenhaven Press.
Stone, L. The Disenchantment of the World. New York Review of Books, 12 Dec, 1971.
Summers M. The Discovery of Witches: A Study of Master Matthew Hopkins.. London: Cayme, 1928.
Does Religion Kill?
Dinesh D’Souza (tothesource.org)
November 29, 2006
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. 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. Moreover, many of the conflicts that are routinely counted as “religious wars” were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to territory and power. Can the wars between England and France be counted as religious wars because the English were Protestants and the French were Catholics? Hardly. The same is true today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims—“God gave us this land” and so forth—but the conflict would remain essentially the same even without these religious motives. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans. Yet today’s atheist authors insist on making religion the culprit. Consider Harris’s analysis of the conflict in Sri Lanka. “While the motivations of the Tamil Tigers are not explicitly religious,” he informs us, “they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death.” In other words, while the Tigers see themselves as combatants in a secular political struggle, Harris detects a religious motive because these people happen to be Hindu and surely there must be some underlying religious craziness that explains their fanaticism. Harris can go on forever in this vein. Seeking to exonerate secularism and atheism from the horrors perpetrated in their name, he argues that Stalinism and Maoism were in reality “little more than a political religion.” As for Nazism, “while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, it was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity.” Indeed, “The holocaust marked the culmination of…two thousand years of Christian fulminating against the Jews.” One finds the same inanities in Dawkins’s work. Don’t be fooled by this rhetorical legerdemain. Dawkins and Harris cannot explain why, if Nazism was directly descended from medieval Christianity, medieval Christianity did not produce a Hitler. How can an ideology advanced by Hitler as a repudiation of Christianity, be a “culmination” of two thousand years of Christianity? Dawkins and Harris are employing a transparent slight-of-hand that holds Christianity responsible for the crimes committed in its name, while exonerating secularism and atheism for the greater crimes committed in their name. Religious fanatics have done things that are impossible to defend, and some of them, mostly in the Muslim world, are still performing horrors on behalf of their creed. But if religion sometimes disposes people to self-righteousness and absolutism, it also provides a moral code that condemns the slaughter of the innocents. In particularly, the moral teachings of Jesus provide no support for—indeed they stand as a stern rebuke to—the historical injustices perpetrated in the name of Christianity. The crimes of atheism have generally been unleashed through a hubristic ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. Using the latest techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. Of course if some people—the Jews, the landowners, the unfit and the handicapped—have to be eliminated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants and their apologists have shown themselves quite willing to pay. Thus they confirm the truth of Dostoyevsky’s dictum, “If God is not, everything is permitted.” Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. 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. [TOP OF PAGE]
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