Posted on 10/11/2001 10:52:36 AM PDT by Chuckmorse
What a remarkably stupid statement!.
Let's see if I understand the concept correctly...
If I start a major religion today, I will get lots of attaboys from you and presumably from everyone else if in the year 3101 that religion has reached the level of ignorance, misery, filth, disease and savagery that existed in the 11th Century?
It's history. The Crusades lasted from the 11th through 13th centuries AD. The reason was to wrest back Christian territory conquered by the [Muslim] Turks. Post #77
You seem to be disoriented and confused...
Which is it?
In the last 300 years? Only one.
Ask a 100 people at random to name the one and you're likely to get 97 correct answers: ISLAM.
Comparing Neanderthals with civilized man is a bit disingenuous.
Even in our oun country within the past 150 years many indigenous Americans got to experience the ignominy of forced conversion to Christianianity.
Go read the Mormon history if you want to see more about how peaceful Christianity is.
And then there is the labeling of people as witches and subsequent burning in Mass.
Read the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition sponsored by Thomas Jefferson. They did some rather nasty things to some of the NorthWest hethans.
Read the crap on this web site about Harry Potter and tell me there are not people today who would not put "heathens" in jail or worse.
Your attempt to catagorize anything done with force in the name of Christianity as done by "Neanderthals" is just spin. It is also a lie.
I guess you would consider the founding fathers Neanderthals.
Mr. 10% -- the government was a tad bit corrupt.
Please quote your source for this remarkable statement. The expedition managed to maintain peaceful relations with all the tribes they ran into. Otherwise, they could hardly have managed the remarkable feat of making it across the continent and back without losing a single man.
Now, lots of other traders and explorers did do some very nasty things to all the Indian tribes. Which most of the tribes reciprocated as best they could. But not Lewis and Clark.
Nobody was ever burned in MA or anywhere else in America as a witch. They were hanged or pressed (don't ask) to death.
Well, not at the time of the Crusades they weren't. Muslims did not get a significant foothold in Eastern Europe till the 1400s. And a big reason they did was because the Crusaders had fatally weakened the Eastern Roman Empire during the Fourth Crusade.
For the most part, wildly divergent religions co-existed peacefully in 19th century America. The violent opposition to Mormonism was due a lot more to various social and political conflicts than it was to differences of religious opinion. For instance, at Nauvoo Joseph Smith organized a uniformed military force that was larger than the US Army. Combined with rhetoric that the Mormons would dispossess their neighbors after God destroyed them, you can understand the neighbors' nervousness, although perhaps not agree with their reaction.
Also, the violence against the Mormons has been exaggerated in LDS propaganda. I've yet to find a definitive source stating the number actually killed during the "persecution," but it is almost certain that more "Gentiles" (including women and children) were killed by Mormons at the Mountain Meadows Massacre than Mormons were killed by Gentiles (for specifically religious reasons) during the entire decades-long period of conflict.
No, atheists\communist and fascist dictators have killed far, far more people than any "religion" ever has!
That's probably the saddest fact of the Twentieth Century. There are so many candidates for the award of top monster that we can't decide between them. Whether it's Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong or Iosif Stalin is, quite frankly, anybody's guess.
For now, let's just skip over the whole margin of error thing -- reasonable people have studied the evidence and come up with wildly differing numbers. You're free to check my sources, but for now, trust me. I've studied the matter at great length and decided that the most likely death toll for these three are:
| TYRANT | DEATHS |
| Mao | 45Million |
| Hitler | 34M |
| Stalin | 20M |
Well, that certainly looks like Mao is our man, but wait. Mao's largest crime is the Great Leap Forward, a bungled attempt to restructure the economy of China which created a famine that killed some 30M. If we confine our indictment to deliberate killings, we get this:
| TYRANT | KILLINGS |
| Hitler | 34M |
| Stalin | 20M |
| Mao | 15M |
So it's Hitler, right? Except that most of the deaths on his head were caused by the Second World War. Sure, he started it, but our society does not blanketly condemn the starting of wars (after all, we reserve the right to do it ourselves in a just cause), and we certainly don't consider killing armed enemy soldiers in a fair fight to be a crime against humanity. If we therefore confine ourselves to the cold-blooded murder of unarmed non-combatants, our table rearranges itself again:
| TYRANT | MURDERS |
| Stalin | 20M |
| Hitler | 15M |
| Mao | 15M |
This brings Stalin floating to the top. So it look like once you reduce their crimes to the unjustifiably lowest common denominator, then Stalin is worst; however, you might want to argue that dead is dead so it really doesn't matter if you give your victims a chance to fight back. Fighting an unjust or reckless war is certainly a crime against humanity, so our numbers should go back to:
| TYRANT | KILLINGS |
| Hitler | 34M |
| Stalin | 20M |
| Mao | 15M |
... and these are just the problems we'll encounter if we accept my numbers without debate. If we want to use the estimates of other scholars, we can pin up to 50 million murders on Stalin, enough to push him to the top of the list regardless of definition. Or we can whittle him down to 10 million murders if we use the low end of the margin of error, and scrounge several more tens of millions for Mao, or away from him.
So, the answer to the question of "Who is roasting on the hottest fires in Hell?" is "Well, that depends..."
Obviously, we're going to run into the same vagueries and uncertainties when we try to rank numbers 4 through 10 on the list of the 20th Century's worst killers, but at least we can nominate the candidates. A pretty good case could be made that each of the following rulers (listed alphabetically) were responsible for over a million unjust, unnecessary or unnatural deaths by initiating or intensifying war, famine, democide or resettlement, or by allowing people under their control to do so:
Here are a few of the century's rulers who could easily be indicted for causing hundreds of thousands of unnatural deaths. Although some might be acquitted due to inadequite evidence or mitigating circumstances, it might be a good idea to not build statues to them.
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