Atheism and Mass Murder

Joseph Stalin's atheistic regime killed tens of millions of people. Concerning atheism and mass murder, Christian apologist Gregory Koukl wrote that "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."[1] Koukl details the number of people killed in various events involving theism and compares them to the much higher tens of millions of people killed under atheistic communist regimes, in which militant atheism served as the official doctrine of the state.[1]

It is estimated that in the past 100 years, governments under the banner of atheistic communism have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 to 259,432,000 human lives.[2] Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987.[3]

Richard Dawkins has attempted to engage in historical revisionism concerning atheist atrocities and Dawkins was shown to be in gross error (see also: Atheism and communism and Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union).

Although Communism is one of the most well-known cases of atheism's ties to mass murder, the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror, inspired by the works of Diderot, Voltaire, Sade, and Rousseau, managed to commit similar persecutions and exterminations of religious people and promote secularism and militant atheism. Official numbers indicate that 300,000 Frenchmen died during Robespierre's Reign of Terror, 297,000 of which were of middle-class or low-class.[4] Of the amount murdered via the guillotine, only 8% had been of the aristocratic class, with over 30% being from the peasant class.[5]

One of the most well known cases of mass murder during the French Revolution was the genocide at Vendee, which has yet to be officially recognized as genocide. Some estimates indicated that Robespierre and the Jacobins planned to massacre well over 15,000,000 Frenchmen,[4] and that he also intended to commit genocide against the Alsace region of France due to their German-speaking populace.[5] Besides the guillotine, the French Revolution also resulted in various other deaths, including trampling children with horses, burning people in ovens, "Republican Marriages" (which involved stripping people naked, tying them together to a log in a suggestive fashion, and then putting them into the water to drown. In the event that there wasn't enough people of both sexes, they also resorted to "tying the knot" in a homosexual manner), cutting recently-raped girls in half after tying them to a tree, crushing pregnant women under wine pressers, cutting up pregnant women and using bayonets to stab the fetus inside before leaving her to die, "catching" infants thrown from a balcony with their bayonets, and using shotguns to ensure people bled out to death.[5]

“ 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.[1] ”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the brutal communist regime he and fellow citizens suffered under.

“ Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' [6] ”

“ Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal162 acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao … The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot. For every Pol Pot whose infamous name is still spoken with horror today, there was a Mengistu, a Bierut, and a Choibalsan, godless men whose names are now forgotten everywhere but in the lands they once ruled with a red hand.

Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation![7]

” 1 Atheist mass murders in history and the historical illiteracy of many atheists 2 Explanatory links between atheism and mass murders 3 China 4 Atheism and abortion

As far the history of atheism in the 20th century, many atheists are not aware of the murderous atheist regimes which inhabited this historical period. Part of the reason why many atheists are unaware of widespread atheist atrocities during this period is due to atheistic indoctrination in public/secular schools.

Christian philosophers and theologians explain that there are causal links between mass murder and atheism. Atheism, lack belief in God, have the following characteristics that can lend itself to mass murder and can explain why the greatest mass murderers were atheists:[8][9][10] ##lack of recognition of an ultimate judge of moral actions and a judge who sets injustice aright in a last judgement, and thus do not recognize the immorality of murder. ##lack of seeing the importance of human beings as images of God and so easily discarding them as merely material things, products of mere chance. ##lack of acknowledging an external standard of moral perfection, thus ending up with self-created standards which can include killing for political survival. ##absence of guidance by divine revelation of the moral law, such as "Thou shalt not kill". ##following an ethic of atheistic evolutionism that is based on the survival and victory of the fittest, which is ultimately a bloodthirsty ethic - an ethic that is eager to kill and to maim. This ethic is about conquering others rather than self-conquest.[11].

The atheist Mao Zedong killed tens of millions during his Great Leap Forward and many more during the purges and slaughters of the Cultural Revolution.

The perverse and cruel atheist Marquis de Sade advocated induced abortion.[12] The father of medicine, Hippocrates, expressly prohibited abortion in his ethical Oath long before Christianity.

The Journal of Medical Ethics article declared concerning the atheist and sadist Marquis de Sade:

“ In 1795 the Marquis de Sade published his La Philosophic dans le boudoir, in which he proposed the use of induced abortion for social reasons and as a means of population control. It is from this time that medical and social acceptance of abortion can be dated, although previously the subject had not been discussed in public in modern times. It is suggested that it was largely due to de Sade's writing that induced abortion received the impetus which resulted in its subsequent spread in western society.[13] ”

Not possessing a religious basis for morality, atheists are fundamentally incapable of having a coherent system of morality which is based on the worldview of atheism (see: Atheism and morality). The Barna Group found that atheists and agnostics in America were more likely, than theists in America, to look upon the following behaviors as morally acceptable: illegal drug use; excessive drinking; sexual relationships outside of marriage; abortion; cohabitating with someone of opposite sex outside of marriage; obscene language; gambling; pornography and obscene sexual behavior; and engaging in homosexuality/bisexuality.[14]

Atheism is the bloodiest and cruelest religion on God's earth is Satans attempt to destroy all mankind from the Kingdom of God before the Lord Jesus Christ returns to destroy atheism and their Satanic lead, and He will fulfil all unfinished prophecy according to His will.

Athiests are the worst murderers of mankind and are living in the darkness of their prison cells that only God in Christ Jesus can enlighten and save from their misery and pain and indwell by His Holy Spirit and then lead by His hand on this revolted province of earth. Come Lord Jesus, rule and reign in the midst of all thine enemies. Let them that hate thee flee before thee. Bless all those saved by grace through faith in thy finished work of Calvary, believing how you, Lord Jesus, were crucified for our sins and rose again the third day and overxcame death and hell and the grave and him that had the power of death, the devil. Who is like unto the Lord Jesus Christ? And who can make war against Him and not be destroyed? He alone is God the Son and He alone will defeat all His enemies when He will defend Israel for 7 years against all her enemies round the world. The final war against antichrist and all His armies at Armageddon He Himself will fight and bring in the 1000 year Kindom of Heaven on the earth on the last day of the tribulation. Let God be true and every man a liar, in order that you may overcome in that day. Who is he that overcomes but He that beleives that Jesus is Lord.

What is so sad is that atheists were, without doubt, TAUGHT to be that way by their parents. Children are our most innocent of all creatures. They can't help what they are taught. And, by the time they are 18 years old or so, it's ALMOST always too late.
After that we can only pray that our good Lord provides them with a sufficient amount of saving grace to heal them. Sometimes He does.

I hope there is a special place in H - E - double hockey sticks for people that abuse children (and animals). Failing to give children any faith and inculcating them into atheism merits the very hot place, for eternity.
My, I seem harsh.

The movie FOR GREATER GLORY with Andy Garcia is an excellent telling of this story on this side of the ocean. Too many people think “It only happened in the old world.”

Rent it, buy it on DVD. It is not the history the MSM wants you to see.

I’d like to see the data before jumping to such a conclusion... I fear Greeks even when they bear gifts.

Someone who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, if denied this by his or her parents, will find it later. That is a bald promise of the Lord. This does not mean the parents do not need to reckon with their guilt in such a situation. But even there the grace of God shows. God sent His Son to take the beatdown for our sins, and the wise will accept this. If we wish a separate vengeance, we expose our own flank in the process because the golden rule is never abrogated.

You might want to read up on the Thirty Years War....half of the European population was killed by Catholic/Lutheran enthusiasts or the starvation that the war brought. By the end...everyone had their fill of religion and misery. Mass murder knows no boundary.

It is a sad truth. But God made a way for people to be saved by grace through faith in Christ Jesus alone, the fact that people reject Him and His blood purchased salvation is their own fault as the Holy Spirit, after Christ ascended into the heavens as the first fruit of the resurrection, convicts the whole world of sin and of judgment and of righteousness and how they refuse His leading shows the evil heart of mankind even from their youth up. Nevertheless, God will not be mocked and only the saved will be in heaven with Him while the atheists will be in hell according to their arrogant and ignorant willfulness against God Almighty, the Father, and His anointed one, Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour.

Per Wikipedia:

Initially a war between Protestant and Catholic states in the fragmenting Holy Roman Empire, it gradually developed into a more general conflict involving most of the great powers of Europe,[15] becoming less about religion and more a continuation of the France–Habsburg rivalry for European political pre-eminence.[16]

There was something more fundamentally wrong here: a presumption by the church that it could partner with Caesar. Rome had been doing it a long time. Luther should have known better. Wars like this are sometimes God’s way of teaching people not to get into bastardly alliances like this.

Still, if we add up the sheer numbers, it looks like modern Communistic atheism has “nothing to be ashamed of” — that is, if the goal is to brag on carnage.

One who looked down history would never have reason to feel completely comfortable with Democrats. From advocacy for slavery to Jim Crow to welfare bribes.

Still, even the GOP has clay elephant feet, so to speak. If we embrace the Lord we get blessed. If we don’t, then only curses remain.

I feel my personal role in this drama is one of evangelist. God has endowed me with a sensitivity to such issues. I’ve learned in a school of hard knocks, just about every way that evangelism can be done wrong.

[As far the history of atheism in the 20th century, many atheists are not aware of the murderous atheist regimes which inhabited this historical period. Part of the reason why many atheists are unaware of widespread atheist atrocities during this period is due to atheistic indoctrination in public/secular schools.]

Secular government schools are a sad part of the reason Obamantion is the ruler of a largly stupid America, I think.

America was far more gospel aware not all that many decades ago.

The associated virtues easily carried over into the conduct of schools. As much as the old song talks about the “hickory stick,” there was also (and much more prevalently) the hugs and the caring and the mutual defense. Teachers felt an obligation of holy love towards their charges. Even most of those who didn’t agree with Christian theology appreciated the benefits it provided through those who did believe it.

This infrastructure is going, going, in some places gone.

Revival is needed if there is to be salvation. God doesn’t begrudge this. It is people who are holding the grudge. We have a fresh mission field today in our own midst. People don’t need to see bible verses on paper as much as they need to see the Word living among them. You could write anything on paper, but the life of godly love cannot be faked.

You wrote, “You might want to read up on the Thirty Years War....half of the European population was killed by Catholic/Lutheran enthusiasts or the starvation that the war brought. By the end...everyone had their fill of religion and misery. Mass murder knows no boundary.”

It should be corrected. It was not half of the European population, but half of the population which was in the path of the French army in the west, the Swedish army from the north and the Austrian army in the southeast. So that was mainly Germany and it’s near neighbors.

You are right, however, in that this was primarily a religious war, but waged by civil authorities, and mostly not condoned by the clergy. It is a shame though that most people have never heard of the Thirty Years War (1617-1647). I can assure you that when doing German genealogy, one quickly encounters references to it in the mid 17th century. Anyone of German descent will have historical connections to this war.

One example of a person inculcated from birth in atheism who was able to find their way out of it is the son of Madalyn Murray O’Hare, William J. Murray, a Baptist minister. On the other hand, Stalin was brought up destined for the priesthood. Rebellion against parents may help explain both examples, but it’s not certain at all that bringing someone up in a religious environment is a guarantee against them becoming an atheist, or the reverse.

The Nazis were atheists despite Germany having been a Christian nation. Hitler paid the merest of lip service to Christianity but ultimately saw it as pacifist. Millions of Christians went to their deaths in the gas chambers as did millions of Jews. The only religion the Nazis truly respected was Islam. Heinrich Himmler said of it: “Islam is the perfect religion for the warrior’’.

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