Every couple of days I check for phone messages at the office, mostly with no results. No one typically wants to talk to me when I am in my office since it is much more convenient to approach me just before a church service begins to ask me a question or solicit an opinion. Today, however, was different. Today there was a phone message left by someone on Sunday afternoon.
His tone was angry. He informed me that I needed neither his name nor his phone number, but proceeded to ask me why we Christians think we have a right to spread our trash through the neighborhood. I think he was referring to our exercise of our Constitutional guarantees of both the free expression of speech and the free practice of religion. He went on to excoriate me for the bloodthirstiness of Christianity which, he claimed, was responsible for more deaths than any other cause in human history. Actually not.
The first time I was confronted with the claim that religion was responsible for more deaths than any other single cause was shortly after my conversion to Christ in 1974 while working as an engineer for Hughes Aircraft Company when a British engineer lit me up for Christianity’s perceived offenses while extolling the peaceful nature of atheism. I was not ready for him, but I have been ready for that type of accusation since then.
Allow me to address the matter in two parts: First, I will address the relative bloodthirstiness of the major religions of the world. Then, I will address the real cause of most man-caused deaths in recorded history.
Consider the Christian religion, founded midway through the first century AD. It spread from Judea to the British Isles in the West and to India in the East in less than a century, and over the course of two or three centuries, there was a great deal of bloodshed. However, history records that it was the Christians whose blood was shed, while those who were not Christians did the killing.
In the seventh century, Islam began to spread from the Arabian Peninsula as far as France to the West and India to the East, with tremendous bloodshed. However, the spread of Islam was different than the spread of Christianity in that the advance of Christianity came at the expense of Christian’s lives while the advance of Islam was at the expense of those put to death by the Muslim’s using a strategy I call sword point evangelism, convert or die. This is easily verified on the Internet. What is generally not known in the West are the tens of millions slaughtered over the centuries in India by invading Muslims, owing to the great hostility Muslims have toward polytheists as opposed to the Christians and Jews to the West, who are described in the Koran as people of the book.
In case someone suggests the Crusades as a point of contention two things should be pointed out: First, the Crusades were a response to Islam overwhelming the Christian Middle East by force of arms. Christians did not voluntarily convert to Islam but converted to avoid death or to avoid severe persecution under Sharia Law. Second, the sheer numbers of attacks against Muslims by Crusaders are dwarfed by a comparison of the order of magnitude greater number of attacks instigated by Muslims over a much longer span of time. Thus, by any reasonable consideration with intellectual honesty, it is seen that far and away the most bloodthirsty religion ever seen is the so-called religion of peace, Islam, which views peace as existing only when Islam subjugates all other religious faiths.
However, contrary to the claims of my British engineer atheist colleague from long ago, and every other atheist who claims religions that are strongly embraced are a danger to peace and tranquility, new information came to light that surprised even me. Of course, I had known for decades that totalitarian regimes usually resorted to bloodshed to maintain their stranglehold on subjugated populations. But I had no idea of the absolute numbers until I recently came across a report referencing the work of the late R. J. Rummel and his 1997 book, Power Kills, in which he reports his findings that in the 20th century alone governments murdered 262 million of their own citizens![1]
So, to the irate caller who objected to members of our church expressing concern for his eternal and undying soul, and to anyone else who would suggest that strongly held religious convictions are an existential threat to health and welfare (unless, of course, it is the religion of Islam), I would suggest you show them the article reference below. And if they won’t read the entire article, show them the table below that is taken from the article.
