More people have been killed in the name of God than anything else, according to almost everyone who has graduated from college in the last 50 times. Most of them concur, too.
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This assertion may require a lengthy article response. Therefore, I will only point out that if the people who make this claim refer to the God of the Bible and, therefore, Christians ( Jews rarely had enough numbers or power to persecute anyone ), then it is simply not true.
Indeed, Jews were killed by Christians, but it was never the church’s custom to do so. For instance, Christians on their approach to the knights slaughtered entire populations of Jews. And tens of millions of indigenous Americans died as a result of Christian colonization and negotiation, despite the fact that the majority of those deaths were brought on by European diseases to which the Americas were infected with no resistance. And Christians murdered other Christians who practiced a distinct philosophy. Between 1618 and 1648, between 1618 and 1648, a conflict between the Catholics and Protestants in Europe resulted in between 5 and 8 million fatalities.
However, there are very few other instances of Catholics killing people on a large scale as Catholics ( as opposed to those who pretended to be Christians killing people in the two world wars ). For instance, during one of the most commonly cited instances of Christian shooting, the Inquisition, no more than 5, 000 people were killed– a quantity both Israeli and non-Jewish historians agree upon.
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In the 2, 000-year history of Christianity, there were far more deaths from Christians in the Mongol attacks of Europe and China, totaling about 40 million and 60 million, both.
The number of people who were killed by Muslims, mostly Arabs, since the introduction of Islam in the seventh century is even unheard of. During the thousand-year Muslim rule in India only, at least a hundred million Hindus were killed. ( The Indian government rarely addresses this because it fears causing tensions between its Muslim and Hindu populations. ) With regard to the staggering number of Hindus killed by Muslims, historian Will Durant, in his magisterial 11-volume” The Story of Civilization” ( co-authored with Ariel Durant ), wrote:” The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history”.
It is insincere to mention the Muslim crime of Hindus as those who have killed “in the name of God” without mentioning that the majority of that dying was committed by Muslims when they claim that “more people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of anyone else” when referring to Christians.
Finally, and most important, there is something in whose title more people have been killed– in the last decade only– than in the name of whatever ( except Allah ). And that thing is “equality”. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other socialist rulers killed at least 100 million soldiers and enslaved a billion people. All in the name of “equality”.
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And that is obvious. While” all men are created equal”, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, based upon the bible, Judeo-Christian causes of the American Revolution, it is not possible to achieve justice without violence. That is why the French Revolution, rooted in “equality”, led to the gallows, while the American Revolution, which was not rooted in justice, led to the best land ever created.
The topic of my second column will be egalitarianism. Why is it a monstrous ideology.