… about Gregory Koukl’s essay, Greatest Mass Murderers Have Been By Far Atheists, Not Christians.

“Many conflicts that appear at first to be religious are actually political or cultural wars that divide along religious lines. The strife in Northern Ireland is not a theological dispute about Catholicism vs. Protestantism per se, but rather a cultural power struggle between two groups of people. In a similar way, much of the conflict in eastern Europe and the Middle East is the result of ethnic hostilities, not genuine religious differences.”

I hear Christians say things like this fairly often. Rarely, if ever, do they provide any evidence to back it up. Koukl sure doesn’t. What we have here instead is Argument By Assertion – “I say it, therefore you should believe it.” It’s not a very persuasive technique.

And the more I think about it, the less plausible his basic claim seems to me to be even as an hypothesis. It basically asserts that a person’s ethnic heritage plays a bigger role in determining a person’s behavior than does the religious or philosophical belief system he or she embraces. That just doesn’t ring true to me.

Both Catholicism and Islam span the globe and have followers from many different ethnic groups yet there’s a very real sense in which they’re at war with each other.

At the same time, the bitter conflicts within both Catholicism and Islam often seem to pit people of the same ethnicity against each other. Just like the bitter Catholic-Protestant conflicts that made a mess of Europe for centuries often split people of the same ethnic group and country. And just like many of my Theist Files reveal how easily religion can split families….

Consider, too, how the secular European Union has brought together many people of many countries under the same broad umbrella of rules and regulations with nary a shot being fired even as the worst European war to be fought since World War II erupted in the former Yugoslavia along centuries-old religious lines.

And of course the conflict in Northern Ireland seems to involve Irish people on both sides who aren’t shy about identifying themselves as Catholics and Protestants rather then as, say, farmers and city slickers or socialists and capitalists.

Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington seems to strongly support my basic point of view in his famous 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Here’s just one of many passages I could quote: “[R]eligion… is the principle defining characteristics of civilizations [and] fault line wars are almost always between peoples of different religions. Some analysts downplay the significance of this factor. They point, for instance, to the shared ethnicity and language, past peaceful coexistence, and extensive intermarriage of Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, and dismiss the religious factor with references to Freud’s ‘narcissism of small differences.’ That judgment, however, is rooted in secular myopia. Millennia of human history have shown that religion is not a ‘small difference’ but possibly the most profound difference that can exist between people. The frequency, intensity, and violence of fault line wars are greatly enhanced by beliefs in different gods” (pp. 253-254).

Note, too, that a national conference on violence that I wrote about back on March 26, 2004 emphasized how religion – not ethnicity or other factors – is motivating more and more of the violence that plagues our world.

I’m surprised that Christians like Koukl even try to make the arguments they do here. After all – judging from the Bible – ethnicity/economics/politics/culture apparently didn’t spark Adam and Eve’s alleged disobedience, nor did it prompt Cain to kill Abel, Moses to rage against the Golden Calf, Noah to curse his son, Ham, Jesus to harshly condemn the money changers and the Pharisees, the Jews and Romans to kill Jesus, or Paul and James to bitterly argue over whether grace or works is more important. In other words, the very book that people like Koukl claim to hold most dear seems itself to be full of bitter, non-ethnic-based conflicts – many of which seem to boil down to very real religious differences instead.

And I’ve yet to come across a Christian who has ever suggested that Christians were thrown to the lions for understandable economic reasons or that a certain saint was actually a martyr to his or her social class or that the final battle between Good and Evil will be sparked by artistic disagreements. In other words, even Christians like Koukl seem to recognize the tremendous power religion has to motivate people to disagree, fight, kill, and die in many other cases – they just seem oddly blind to its power to do so in those cases we atheists are most inclined to bring to their attention. That seems more than a little arbitrary and self-serving, doesn’t it?

“The Crusades, the Inquisition, some of the religious wars of the Reformation and the Salem witch trials, on the other hand, were more theological. Even so, the record is not as grim as many make it.

“Thousands of witches were not burned at the stake in America; the Salem witch trials resulted in 19 executions before they were stopped by Christians. The Spanish Inquisition involved thousands and the Crusades tens of thousands, not millions.”

Koukl seems to be working hard to minimize the crimes of Christians in a way I find terribly parochial and inaccurate.

It’s odd, for example, that he’d mention the low casualty count of the Salem witch trials while completely ignoring the 30,000 to 100,000 “witches” that Wikipedia tells me were executed in Europe between 1450 and 1700.

It’s also odd that he would choose to focus on the Salem “witches” rather than the many, many more Jewish people who have died in Christian-orchestrated pogroms.

And it’s also odd that he would claim that the Spanish Inquisition involved “thousands” without mentioning that while researchers such as García Cárcel believe that 3000-5000 may have been executed, as many as 150,000 people were “processed” – often in what seems to have been very horrid ways at a time when the population of Europe was much smaller than today, human rights agencies were non-existent, and the opportunities for flight were severely limited.

And of course the Spanish Inquisition was merely one small part of a much wider, centuries-long reign of Christian tyranny and terror which sought to combat heresy and other “thought crimes” in ways we can scarcely imagine today. How do we begin to measure the existential panic generated in the minds of generations of people by fire-and-brimstone sermons? How do we begin to measure the depth and breadth of the fear that could be sparked in a city or region by the news that one more person had been burned at the stake for holding the “wrong” views about Jesus or gOd?

Perhaps most important of all, how do we begin to measure the degree to which all this terror and fear suppressed free inquiry and retarded scientific progress for centuries? How many untold millions of people died of smallpox and polio, measles and influenza, cholera and diphtheria, bad food and poor sanitation practices, and a host of other preventable causes as an indirect result of the Christian emphasis on prayer and faith and “right thinking” and the demonization of open-minded learning, questioning, investigation, and empirical testing?

Koukl could have at least acknowledged Christianity’s role in Europe’s brutal colonization of much of the rest of the planet, or the “Manifest Destiny” which justified the American slaughter of Indians and Mexicans (among others), or the self-righteous manner in which oh-so-religious Americans dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations and then spent some 40 years threatening to incinerate millions upon millions of other human beings if that’s what it took to fend off those dastardly gOdless Communists….

“The greatest evil has resulted from the denial of God, not the pursuit of God. Conservative columnist Dennis Prager has noted, ‘In this (20 th) century alone, more innocent people have been murdered, tortured and enslaved by secular ideologies — Nazism and communism — than by all religions in history.’”

Like many other Christians, Koukl seems blissfully unaware that Hitler was a Catholic whose religion-heavy book and speeches sold a very Christian Germany on the idea that he was saving Germany and the world from those “evil” Christ-killing Jews. (And as William L. Shirer explains in detail in his monumental book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it was Martin Luther and his vehemently anti-Jewish tirades that paved the way for Hitler….)

Like many other Christians, Koukl also conflates communism and atheism when the two are very different things (as I’ve repeatedly attempted to explain in this diary).

“Guinness reports: ‘The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against another is the 26.3 million Chinese killed during the regime of Mao Zedong between 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed … the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million.’

“In the former Soviet Union, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that state repression and terrorism took more than 66 million lives from 1917 to 1959.

“The worst per-capita genocide happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. According to Guinness, ‘More than one-third of the 8 million Khmers were killed between April 17, 1975, and January 1979.’”

I agree with much of what Austin Cline had to say about claims like these – especially this: “Atheism itself isn’t a principle, cause, philosophy, or belief system which people fight, die, or kill for. Being killed by an atheist is no more being killed in the name of atheism than being killed by a tall person is being killed in the name of tallness.”

A lot more can be said, however.

—– All of these decades-old examples are from faraway, non-Western places that none of the people involved in this debate seem in a very good position to evaluate. If I say “Christian Europeans came to the New World and proceeded to kill, enslave, and steal the land away from millions of native non-Christians in the belief that they were doing the work of the Lord,” many of the people who read this diary will know exactly what I mean and how to go about determining whether or not what I’m claiming is true. When Christians like Koukl starts throwing out casualty figures for countries neither they nor any atheist I know has ever visited or studied in-depth and then blithely proceeds to draw sweeping conclusions about why and what’s to blame, I suspect that they’re engaging in cheap polemics rather than a search for the truth.

—– Although Christians seem extremely fond of telling me that Mao killed millions, not one has ever seemed to know anything about the 20 million or so deaths attributed to Hong Xiuquan, the Chinese man whose mind was warped by Christianity, claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus, and ended up sparking a horrible civil war about 150 years ago. Had Mao been a Christian, would Christians now be quietly forgetting his crimes, too? Or merely distorting them the way they distort Hitler’s? I wonder….

—– I own a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work, The Gulag Archipelago. “Atheism” isn’t even included in its very extensive index. If that’s really the root cause of the horrors he describes, how can this be? (“Stalin” is included – but none of the references seem to touch on his religious beliefs.) Then again, Solzhenitsyn’s judgment seems less than sterling, given that Wikipedia tells me that he “strongly condemned [the] 1999 NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, saying that ‘there is no difference between NATO and Hitler.’”

—– What happened in Cambodia seems to have been awful and I’m inclined to deplore it and whatever caused it. Exactly what happened and what caused it, however, is far from obvious to me. President Nixon – a Quaker – and his apparently illegal decision to expand the Vietnam War to Cambodia seems to have been a contributing factor. Communist Vietnam seems to have played a big role in putting an end to the horrible regime of Pol Pot that was most responsible for the atrocities that happened there – after which the US continued to back him and his Khmer Rouge! If atheism played a significant role in any of this, I’m not sure what it may have been. If you know, please enlighten me. (And if you can explain why the US – a “Christian Nation” – seems to have officially backed a mass murderer instead of the people who ousted him, I’d really appreciate that, too.)

—– According to Romans 13:1-3, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power?” This seems to be saying that rulers only acquire power because gOd wants them to have power and we ought to just shut up and obey them. Given this, how can a Christian like Koukl condemn Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot even if they did kill millions and millions of people? Judging from Romans 13, it seems gOd himself must have wanted those people dead.

—– No matter how evil Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or any other ruler in history may have been, it’s important to remember that – according to the Bible and Christianity – none of them invented evil. None of them invented pain or suffering or death. According to the Bible and Christianity, an omnipotent creator gOd did. That gOd bears ultimate responsibility – not human beings, and not atheism. If that gOd had wanted a pain-free, death-free world of unending happiness and roses and puppy dogs, he could and should have created it. If that gOd wasn’t happy with the specific slaughters orchestrated by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, he could and should have stepped in and stopped them. He allegedly has all the power. He allegedly set the rules of the game and could have changed them at any time. If he’s unhappy with the way the game played out, he has only himself to blame.

But of course I don’t believe he exists. If you’re a Christian like Koukl who believes he does, however, it seems to me you need to stop making excuses for him and hold him to account OR redefine the slaughters you attribute to atheists as good things and start praising them for inadvertently furthering the goals of your lord.

(NOTE: If you decide to hold your gOd to account, don’t forget that he’s actually responsible for the pain, suffering, and death of untold BILLIONS of people – as well as all the countless deaths that have been experienced by millions of other species, 99% of which he seems to have rendered extinct.)

“Nothing in Christian teaching mandates forcible conversion or coerced adherence to biblical doctrines.”

The fire-and-brimstone sermons preached by Jesus in the Bible (and by countless others since) certainly amount to psychological coercion.

And no less a figure than St. Thomas Aquinas explained why killing heretics was justified.

“The teachings of Christ do not lead logically to wanton bloodshed.”

They don’t?

Consider:

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” - Matt 10:34-35

“Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.” - Luke 12:52-53

“[H]e that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” - Luke 22:36

Consider also the fact that here’s a guy/lord who supposedly is going to come back and plunge the world into a bloody, apocalyptic war of unprecedented devastation and thenthrow the vast majority of humans who have ever lived into eternal hellfire. If that sounds to you like a guy/lord who thinks a little wanton bloodshed by his friends and supporters is a bad idea (even though he himself seems to have promised them heaven no matter how much gore they create), please explain why.

“In fact, Christ and his followers have been the greatest force for good in history.

“Consider William Wilberforce, who helped abolish slavery in the British Empire 200 years ago; Mother Teresa, who ministered to the poor of Calcutta; and William Booth, who worked tirelessly to alleviate human suffering with the Salvation Army.”

What Koukl neglects to tell his readers is that the Bible itself promotes slavery, that Jesus apparently never bothered to say a single word against it, that Paul defended it, that Christians developed, promoted, benefitted from, and ardently strived to maintain the slave trade for hundreds of years, and that Southern American Christians fought one of the bloodiest civil wars in history in an attempt to keep their “right” to own other people as if they were cows or pigs.

What he also neglects to tell his readers is that Mother Teresa denied her patients pain medication in the belief that pain was good for them, that she was absolutely against birth control despite the horrors of places like Calcutta (one of the most over-populated cities on earth), and that her opposition to condom use even by those with AIDS helped spread the disease and condemn untold numbers of people to a terrible, early death.

“The list goes on and on. And for every well-known servant of Christ to the poor and downtrodden, there have been millions more who served quietly, unnamed and unnoticed.”

If they served unnamed and unnoticed, how does he know that they really served at all?

Given what we know about the many false and misleading claims Christians like Koukl make about people like Mother Teresa, why should we believe their claims about unnamed people?

“This is Christianity’s real record — not a history of evil, violence and debauchery, but a legacy of radical transformation for good.”

Even if for the sake of argument we grant that every Christian in the history of the world has done great good deeds they never would have done had they been atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Taoists, Confucians, animists, Wiccans, or any other variety of non-Christian, that would prove absolutely nothing about the objective truth of Christianity.

Given that Christians seem to disagree among themselves about each and every theological, political, and personal issue I can think of, it’s not even clear to me what Koukl means when he uses the term “Christian” – or exactly what he ought to mean. Until that little matter is cleared up, does it even make sense to ask what “Christianity’s real record” has been?

You tell me.