Not as much as you might think.
The world's greatest authority on the subject, R. J. Rummel, a professor at Univ. of HI, has calculated that governments, more or less in time of peace, murded 262M of their citizens during the 20th century, while about 40M died in wars during the 20th.
whil262http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/05/dictatorships_d.html
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/PERSONAL.HTM
Not all of these governments were "secular humanist" in nature, but those who were accounted for the vast majority of the deaths.
ping
for the forum’s reference:
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
by Stéphane Courtois et al.,
Well, not entirely true in any direction. To begin with, religion isn’t really to blame for most of the killing done in its name. That is, usually there are other reasons, but religion is used as both a justification and rationalization of why there is killing.
Of course, there have been many killing that were purely religious in nature, but beyond a certain *scale*, it is almost invariably just used as an excuse for some far more mundane reason, such as ethnic hatred, greed, family and tribal feuds, etc.
So, in turn, the flip side to this is that atheism, while truly responsible for lots of killing, was actually only a part of other, again more mundane, reasons and rationales for war and murder.
The water is muddied further if you compare the two bloodiest conflicts in human history, World War II and the Taiping Rebellion in China (a conflict almost never mentioned in US schools, but with between 20-50 million dead, directly and indirectly, which overlapped the US Civil War).
World War II was actually two war rolled into one, and only the Soviets were to any degree atheist, which even they downplayed during the war, hoping for Russian Orthodox support. And yet, almost everywhere else the war had almost no religious significance at all, except peripherally.
The Taiping Rebellion, however, was started by a charismatic nut-case who fancied himself as Jesus’ messianic younger brother. He got this idea in what had to have been by far the worst blunder ever unintentionally committed, by a Protestant missionary who gave him a religious tract.
However, no sane person would blame Christianity, or even that missionary, for this, in what has to rank as one of the worst simple mistakes in human history.
In the final analysis, I would not blame atheism, either, for that vast majority of murderousness. Instead, blame the philosophy which encompassed it, communism.
That is, while communists did destroy many churches, mosques, and synagogues, and killed many religious people and their religious leaders for being who they were, they killed a LOT more people, not in the name of atheism, but in the name of communism.
Communism didn’t and doesn’t just kill for atheism. It kills for ethnic hatred, economic hatred, political hatred, out of a pure lust for power and desire to steal, tear down and destroy, and yes, also for religion.
Atheism by itself can’t hold a candle to communism for pure blood lust.
Isn’t it morally wrong to post stuff like this WITHOUT A BARF ALERT??????
What a crock. Doesn’t everybody know that the environmentalist agenda has killed more people in the 20th century than any other group? That figure must be approaching 20 or 30 million. Maybe 2nd to communism but its neck and neck. The annual deaths under communism is nothing compared to the days of Stalin but environmentalism still easily kills a million a year if not 2.
I don’t mean to preach to the quire but this is exactly why the Second Amendment of the US Constitution was put there. Governments who kill their own citizens out right or relinquish the people’s sovereignty and liberty to entities for the purpose of civilian control is obviously enough cause to clean the state house.
I don’t think that the complete and utter brutality of Marxist regimes throughout the world in the 20th Century up through today, is being taught in public schools.
The PC worldview which is being espoused is that communists were/are “idealists” out to improve the lot of the common man. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
By removing religion from their societies, particularly, Christianity, the totalitarian regimes were stripping their people of their God-given dignity and right to life. The “state” replaced “religion” .
Talk to someone who lived through the Bolshevik Revolution - that’s an eye opener.
Yet self-styled conservatives often call for unfettering the American government’s power to intrude on the lives of private citizens. Do they believe our government is any less vulnerable to the pitfalls of human nature than any other?
It seems that Communism was the biggest killer of the 20th century and quite possibly Muslim religion will be the biggest killer of the 21st century because I think everything that we read about the violent nature of Islam is only the tip of the iceberg...