I heard a while back that more people had died in the name of Jesus than in the name of Hitler. I’d always wondered if it was true, it seemed perfectly plausible given the persistence and viciousness of the Vatican during the Crusades. Unfortunately, I had found it difficult to find a number of deaths from the Crusades. But, I found in Google Answers, this webpage that chronicles numerous human conflicts and includes a category for religious conflicts. The numbers are hazy, of course, when we’re speaking about conflicts hundreds or thousands of years ago when death tallies were not a priority or of mild interest like they are today.
In short, 809 million people have died in religious wars. That’s nearly a billion people.
Oftentimes, a retort is that secular ideals and Godless Communism have killed many more. It is true that Stalin, among others, slaughtered his own people by the millions during the industrialization of Soviet Russia. By comparison, 209 million have died in the name of Communism. Some 62 million died during World War II, civilian and military, on all sides. Conclusively, more people have died in the name of religion than in the name of Communism or Hitler, or the two combined times two.
Hang on! You are comparing two completely separate values there. The 800,000,000 figure quoted is the religeous total throughout history. Surely the only sensible comparative figure would be the number of religeous deaths that occurred during the same time frame as communism and Hitler. Alternatively, compare the total number of religeous war deaths throughout history to the total number of non-religeous war deaths throughout history. If ou do that, according to the Google Answers reference you cite, there are MUCH FEWER religeous war deaths than non-religeous war deaths.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/gunsorxp.htm#XP
My original quest was to compare deaths in the name of Jesus with deaths in the name of Hitler. In that case, it comes down to fifty-six million Christian deaths (as referenced in the site I just pasted), compared with twenty-two million [em]military[/em] deaths in World War II on both sides combined.
I only mentioned the tally of all wars throughout history because I often hear that ‘atheist’ doctrines like Communism have killed ‘many more,’ which is clearly not the case.
You’re right that it’s unfair to compare different time periods, but that is the very comparison warranted by the original charges.
800 Million religious deaths!? Preposterous. You are counting all wars of the Middle Ages as religious wars. Most of these were political dressed up as religion wars. The BBC did a special study on the Inquisition and only about 3,000 people were executed over 300 years!!!
The Crusades were more political and defensive than religious and the total deaths of ALL of the Crusades were no more than a million, and more than half of those were from starvation or drowning (crossing the Mediterranean).
The TOTAL population back in the time of the Crusades and Inquistion was no more than 150 Million and the Black Death claimed about 50 Million. So these estimates are really laughable.
[...] argument a lot without any backing numbers, so I’m starting to get skeptical of it’s validity… http://bookrate.wordpress.com/2006/07/22/deaths-over-history-religious-vs-nonreligous/ In short, eight-hundred and nine million people have died in religious wars. That’s nearly a [...]
If you ever get to a substantial answer to this question I would be grateful for an alert.
I am curious, what methodology did you use to tally up the deaths?
Did you use the median count?
Cheers
I’m not sure what you mean by the median count. For religious deaths, I took the totals listed on the site provided in the post (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatz.htm#RelCon). That site’s bibliography is here (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm). For deaths from “secular” conflicts, including communism – the two World Wars, etc. – I used death counts from WikiPedia, which are noncontroversial.
It’s true. Religion causes hatred of those different than thou.
There is no god. Get over it. Think for yourself instead of blindly following beliefs held by primitive people who thought everything in the universe revolved around us.
Amen Brother!
Did I just type that….?
LOL
LOL – You compare a less than decade of Hitlerian war and 70 years of Communism with 8,000 years of recorded history?
Almost every war is essentially tribal war, anyway. It’s just that some are fought using God as a justification.
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