Posted on 11/20/2006 5:42:11 PM PST by Lorianne
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 bestseller "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, and 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 still haunts the liberal imagination.
It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. 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 minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
The wars of religion were also waged for "mixed motives." Bohemond took the cross during the First Crusade because the Normans wanted to displace
the Greeks as the dominant power in the East. The Thirty Years War began because the Hapsburg emperor wished to gain control over all of the Holy Roman Empire. The French supported the Swedes rather than Austria because they wished to prevent the Emperor from doing this and surrounding France on three sides. Don't forget that the leader of France was a Cardinal of the Church of Rome, but put politics before his faith, in part because he knew that the Emperor was not engaged in a crusade against the protestants but in
an effort to make the Empire (Germany) the most powerful state in Europe.
Where the Church has used the sword it is because she has forgotten the three temptions of the devil, one of which is worldly power. Christ could not be "turned" but rhe Church often has. Communists, however, subscribe to
a worldy utopia. Not God but blind necessity commands them to do what they do. The atheist does not believe in God but he believes in Demiurge.
Islam is by far the most worldy of the Abrahamic religions.
Ok, genius....what happened with the Soviet Union, GErmany, or China, or Cuba, or N Korea?
The article, if you actually read it, pegs you perfectly......those like you ascribing all evil to religion, while excusing the much bigger mountain of evidence that shows the cruelty and savagery of atheist paradises.
It's called straining at gnats and swallowing camels.....a pretty good desciption of you and yours.......
Why not admit that the 20th Century ideologies are far more brutal and fanatical than almost any religion. Why not? They look upon man as just an intelligent ape.
Islam is hard to like. Small minded, petty, degrading.....a lot like what atheism strips humanity to in the name of compassion towards humanity.
That appears to be an exaggeration.
Between three and eight million persons died in the 30 year war, which is about the same that died in the Napoleonic Wars which were only a third as long.
And the 30 Year War was far from being purely religious. France and Swedan were allies.
Atheism is a bad thing.
IAC, Islam reduces God --and man--to will. In their way of thing, rational argument has not use but to apply the Koran and the traditons to modern conditions.
Like many other arguments with liberals the facts are irrelevant. Only the seriousness of the charge matters, as Rush often says. That is because what we are really dealing with is not war and peace, but power. Anticlericalism seeks to coopt the moral authority and the wealth of churches to enhance the power of the grasping group.
Voltaire never lived to see the French Terror, where the Jacobins killed more people in one year than the Inquisition did in several hundred. The war in the Vendee was ever bit as savage any any of the Wars in relgion in France in the 16th Century. You are right. Every civilization is shaped by a "religion" if we include in that ideologies which substitute for religion. The problem is that "reason" tends to dissolve into the sovereignty of the will and blood lust. Liberalism's acceptance of abortion on demand is nonetheless bloodthirsty even if the killing is done by surgical instruments rather than swords.
read later
paradise. I find the biblers, koraners, torahers etc. annoying.
Well, let's split the difference: when we [or the Israelis, which is more likely] nuke iran, on their ledger it would be counted as religion, and on ours - as secular. Yes, let's split the difference.
For Israel, military strength is the difference between life and death. In any case. Many Zionists were not religious. On the other hand. one of the leading backers of Zionism was not a Jew but an evangelical Christian, the earl of Shaftesbury, a leading figure during Disraeli's time.
paradise. I find the biblers, koraners, torahers etc. annoying.
We all got to be annoyed by someone ...
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