Here are two essays that give very different answers to that question:

Greatest Mass Murderers By Far Have Been Atheists, Not Christians (Gregory Koukl, The Columbus Dispatch, Feb 2, 2007)

It’s easy to characterize religion as bloodthirsty. History seems to be strewn with the wreckage of witch hunts, crusades and jihads. If God does exist, a caller to my southern California radio show offered, he ought to be tried for crimes against humanity.

“New atheists” such as Letter to a Christian Nation author Sam Harris and The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins, seem to blame religion — particularly Christianity — for all the world’s ills. But nothing could be further from the truth.

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.

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.

Of course, it’s tragic when even a handful of innocent lives are taken. Injustice isn’t justified because the numbers diminish. But an accurate accounting does put things in perspective, especially when you consider the alternative: Has atheism fared any better?

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.”

Grab an older copy of the Guinness Book of World Records and turn to the category “Judicial,” subheading “Crimes: Mass Killings.” You’ll find that immense carnage resulted not from religion, but from institutionalized atheism. (The 2007 edition of the book lacks those categories.)

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.”

The greatest evil does not result from people zealous for God. It results when people are convinced there is no God to whom they must answer.

Let’s ask another question: Are oppression and bloodshed religious duties of Christianity or logical applications of the teachings of Christ?

Nothing in Christian teaching mandates forcible conversion or coerced adherence to biblical doctrines. The teachings of Christ do not lead logically to wanton bloodshed. 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.

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.

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

(Gregory Koukl is the president of Stand to Reason, an organization devoted to the defense of classical Christian values.)

How Many Were Killed by Communists In The Name Of Atheism & Secularism? (Austin Cline, About.com)

Myth: How many people in Communist Russia and China have been killed because of atheism and secularism?

Response: None, probably.

How can that be? After all, millions and millions of people died in Russia and China under communist governments — and those governments were both secular and atheistic, right? So weren’t all of those people killed because of atheism — indeed, in the name of atheism and secularism?

No, that conclusion does not follow. 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.

People were killed in communist nations for a lot of different reasons. Some were communists who disagreed with those in power and were killed because of that. Some were anti-communists opposed the government and were killed for that. Some were simply in the way or inconvenient and were killed for that. These are political disagreements that people were being killed over, not murder in the name of atheism.

But weren’t a lot of people killed because they were Christian? Certainly — but not simply because they were Christian. Communists typically regarded religious organizations as a hinderance towards the creation of a worker’s paradise. Some religious groups also opposed the communists. Once again, we are generally looking at political issues, not a question of atheism.

Even if some people were killed simply because they followed a religion, it does not follow that they were killed in the name of atheism. Why? Because atheism is not inherently opposed to religion: it is possible to be both an atheist and religious and some religions are themselves atheistic. Atheism also isn’t a belief system or ideology which can, by itself, inspire people to do things — good or bad.

To understand this better, consider times in the past when religion has been involved with violence — the Inquisition would be good. How many people were killed during the Inquisition in the name of theism? None. Those doing the killing acted not because of theism, but rather because of Christian doctrines. The belief system is what inspired people to act (sometimes for good, sometimes for ill). The single belief of theism, however, did not.

Similarly, communism certainly inspired people to act and gave them motivations to do certain things, but atheism — which is the absence of a belief and not even a belief itself — did not. The assumption that people in Russia and China were killed merely on account of atheism is based upon two other myths: first, that atheism is itself some sort of philosophy or belief system which can motivate people, and second that atheism is somehow interchangeable with the actual belief system of communism. It also pretends that all the various elements of communist totalitarianism were irrelevant to what happened — which is utter nonsense.

The aforementioned parallel explains why this response is not one which religious theists can use to deny their religion’s responsibility for violence in the past. Atheism and theism may not themselves be sufficient to justify violence and murder (or good behavior, for that matter), but belief systems which incorporate them are more than sufficient. Communism (or at least certain forms of it) can be blamed for communist violence; Christianity (or at least certain forms of it) can also be blamed for Christian violence. As a belief system with specific doctrines that were openly held up as justifying or sanctioning violence, religion must be held responsible for the violence committed in its name.

Whether theism can be slightly more culpable than atheism is a matter of dispute. Not being any belief at all, atheism can’t motivate anyone in any direction to do anything. Theism is a belief, however, so at least the potential for some sort of motivation in some direction exists. It’s been argued, for example, that monotheism is inherently more prone to violence because of the way it tends to be exclusivist — unlike polytheism, which tends to be more tolerant of cultural and religious differences.

It’s difficult to say, though, how many of these problems are really inherent in the type of theism and how many are cultural products of the religious belief systems that incorporate them. Whatever culpability theism itself might have, it’s likely small enough to dismiss, allowing us to treat it and atheism as functionally equal in this context.

(Austin Cline is a Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and a former Publicity Coordinator for the Campus Freethought Alliance.)

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