God is love ... period. He is the source of life. While some fundamentalists may take God's message to ridiculous extremes, consider the alternative - a world without God. Many have tried to accomplish this goal; let's take a closer look at their legacies.
Here is a tentative list of modern mass murderers and the estimated number of people killed by their orders (excluding enemy armies). In many cases (notably Stalin's and Mao's cases) one has to decide how to consider the millions who died indirectly because of their political decisions. The Chinese cultural revolution caused the death of 30 million people (according to the current Chinese government), but many died of hunger. Stalin is held responsible for the death of millions by Ukrainians, but "only" half a million people were killed by his order. Khomeini sent children to die in the war against Iraq, but it was a war.
Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50) | 49-78,000,000 |
Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) | 12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians deliberately killed in WWII plus 3 million Russian POWs left to die) |
Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908) | 8,000,000 |
Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39) | 6,000,000 (the gulags plus the purges plus Ukraine's famine) |
Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44) | 5,000,000 (civilians in WWII) |
Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-20) | 1,200,000 Armenians (1915) + 350,000 Greek Pontians and 480,000 Anatolian Greeks (1916-22) + 500,000 Assyrians (1915-20) |
Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79) | 1,700,000 |
Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94) | 1.6 million (purges and concentration camps) |
Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78) | 1,500,000 |
Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970) | 1,000,000 |
Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982) | 900,000 |
Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994) | 800,000 |
Saddam Hussein (Iran 1980-1990 and Kurdistan 1987-88) | 600,000 |
Tito (Yugoslavia, 1945-1987) | 570,000 |
Suharto (Communists 1965-66) | 500,000 |
Fumimaro Konoe (Japan, 1937-39) | 500,000? (Chinese civilians) |
Jonas Savimbi (Angola, 1975-2002) | 400,000 |
Mullah Omar - Taliban (Afghanistan, 1986-2001) | 400,000 |
Idi Amin (Uganda, 1969-1979) | 300,000 |
Yahya Khan (Pakistan, 1970-71) | 300,000 (Bangladesh) |
Ante Pavelic (Croatia, 1941-45) | 359,000 (30,000 Jews, 29,000 Gipsies, 300,000 Serbs) |
Benito Mussolini (Ethiopia, 1936; Libya, 1934-45; Yugoslavia, WWII) | 300,000 |
Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire, 1965-97) | ? |
Charles Taylor (Liberia, 1989-1996) | 220,000 |
Foday Sankoh (Sierra Leone, 1991-2000) | 200,000 |
Suharto (Aceh, East Timor, New Guinea, 1975-98) | 200,000 |
Ho Chi Min (Vietnam, 1953-56) | 200,000 |
Michel Micombero (Burundi, 1972) | 150,000 |
Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia, 1992-99) | 100,000 |
Hassan Turabi (Sudan, 1989-1999) | 100,000 |
Jean-Bedel Bokassa (Centrafrica, 1966-79) | ? |
Richard Nixon (Vietnam, 1969-1974) | 70,000 (Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians) |
Efrain Rios Montt (Guatemala, 1982-83) | 70,000 |
Papa Doc Duvalier (Haiti, 1957-71) | 60,000 |
Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic, 1930-61) | 50,000 |
Hissene Habre (Chad, 1982-1990) | 40,000 |
Chiang Kai-shek (Taiwan, 1947) | 30,000 (popular uprising) |
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (USSR, 1917-20) | 30,000 (dissidents executed) |
Francisco Franco (Spain) | 30,000 (dissidents executed after the civil war) |
Fidel Castro (Cuba, 1959-1999) | 30,000 |
Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam, 1963-1968) | 30,000 |
Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez (El Salvador, 1932) | 30,000 |
Hafez Al-Assad (Syria, 1980-2000) | 25,000 |
Khomeini (Iran, 1979-89) | 20,000 |
Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe, 1982-87, Ndebele minority) | 20,000 |
Bashir Assad (Syria, 2012) | 14,000 |
Rafael Videla (Argentina, 1976-83) | 13,000 |
Guy Mollet (France, 1956-1957) | 10,000 (war in Algeria) |
Harold McMillans (Britain, 1952-56, Kenya's Mau-Mau rebellion) | 10,000 |
Paul Koroma (Sierra Leone, 1997) | 6,000 |
Osama Bin Laden (worldwide, 1993-2001) | 3,500 |
Augusto Pinochet (Chile, 1973) | 3,000 |
Al Zarqawi (Iraq, 2004-06) | 2,000 |
Cambodia's Pol Pot began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia inspired in part by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution which he had witnessed first-hand during a visit to Communist China. He began by declaring, "This is Year Zero," and that society was about to be "purified." Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism. All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world.
Throughout Cambodia, deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the "old society" - the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and former government officials. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including eventually many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned with an ax. "What is rotten must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.
Yes ... as evidenced by the above table, banishing God from society resolves all problems. (/sarc)
Atheism isn’t communism. Period.