Many atheists on this site have been talking about how horrible the history of christianity is and how detrimental religion is to a society.

And yet i am not seeing any statistics on any of this. Now honestly reading these posts it does look like religion has been the central theme for most of the horrible things in this world. That seems to be the consensus here and that did not seem to be right to me so i decide to do a little research.

I will post a link at the bottom of this thread, but for now will quote some of the findings.




Wow! you atheist are terrible people. Maybe we should do something about this epidemic of blood thirsty atheist.

Or maybe you could just say that people in general do aweful things and it has nothing to do whether or not your claim to be an atheist or a christian?

I guess that is up to you.

LINK

the tables got a little messed up, but you can see the originals through the link.

Like you said, it seems like people are the problem (maybe we should do something about the blood thirsty human race), not specifically religion or atheism.

agreed

On earth, religion is just a tool whose purpose is to make the universe understandable and to make life smoother. Like any tool it can be misused to harm people and mislead people to harm people.

A screwdriver is a tool. If I stab someone in the eye with a screwdriver, nobody blames the screwdriver. I don't see why religion is different.

I also don't think it makes sense to blame atheism for murders that atheists commit.

awesome

plenty of people blame guns for crimes

actually, when you look at the fact, biblically speaking, that man would have lived for ever if there was not sin, and satan introduced sin to man, satan can be attributed to the death of everyone.

that graph would be a little different.

And because satan is the father of evil, and evil can cause people to kill, everyone that was killed by someone that was not in directo order of God, should be blamed on satan.

Saying that huge mass murderers are non-theists is the same as saying they were non-bowlers. What does the fact that they DON'T believe in something have to do with their actions? Here's my point:

The religious crimes you see examples of happen in the name of God.
The non-religious crimes you see examples of do NOT happen in the name of atheism.

Mass murders committed by atheists were done for other reasons (politics, power, etc.) and the perpetrators just HAPPENED to be atheists. Nobody says, "I'm killing you because the god I feel doesn't exist never told me to let you live!"

wow, some very loose and wrong interpretation of the bible going on here

Also, keep in mind that these 20th century killers had access to modern weapons and machinery that wasn't available to people at the time of the religious crimes in question, so the number of killings are much higher. If they were available (think: WMD's in the wrong hands), it would be a whole different ballgame.

and looking at the first table of statics show that in those times there were still way more murders that had nothing to do with religion. Religion only accounted for less than 3%.

so your statement does not prove anything.

and the first table is really the most astounding of all, because in those times a strong majority of the world was tied to religion. so the people that were not tied to religion, which was a small percentage, were accounting for the largest percentage of killings. pretty remarkable.

The charts are more than a little biased.

But I won't argue it, because it doesn't matter. Atheism isn't a doctrine, it can't kill anyone. The religious atrocities largely had religion as their stated motivation, while none of them had atheism as their stated motivation. Incidentally, almost all of them had ideology at their root, and ideology is the real enemy. Religion is just a subset of ideology - but yes, other forms of ideology are also deadly.

Does someone need to post the pirates graph again?

As others pointed out, none of this shows causation.

I'll also add that nothing can be caused by a lack of something, except to the extent that we could say, for instance, that atheism caused these murders if we could show that theism(in any and all forms) on the part of those committing the murders would have stopped them from committing them.

this, of course, seems a stretch.

but I don't think it is a stretch to say that, in general, a belief in specific brands of theism may have prevented many murders. In this case though, it would be (specific brand of theism vs anyone lacking that particular brand of thesm) not (specific brand of theism vs atheism)

of course, with respect to most of the data you present, there were more influential factors at play than theism vs atheism, or even a particular brand of theism vs atheism.

it has everything to do with their actions. One could deduce based on the number of religious killings vs. the number of non-religious killings that people that do not have a belief in God are more prone to killing.

It can be said that without the objective morality of the bible, atheist hold very little value for life, and therefore kill without regard.

When looking at everyone divided into two structures, those that believe in the bible and those that do not, the killings of those that do not greatly out way those that do believe in the bible.

so why is it then when someone who claims to be a christian kills, it is christianity that caused it, but when someone who claims to be an atheists kills it has nothing to do with atheism?

the christian satan is never mentioned in genesis, where original sin appears so i have a hard time believing he could be blamed for that, hell those who believe only in the old testament (jews) don't even believe in any sort of devil. unless sin started with jesus (who died to relieve sin, so that is impossible), satan is a new testament thing.

Except that the table is wrong. Pretty much all of those killers were religious, and many were religiously motivated.

I have been waiting for this all my life. Please give me a list of this objective morality that you use as a reference. Until you can do that, stop claiming that an objective morality exists. If it's not clear cut, then for all intent and purposes, it's not objective.

And you cannot say "It IS objective, but nobody knows what it really is yet."

What do they say about the serpent, and about Job, etc?

Satan is mentioned in the old testament. but you are correct that the view of satan is different in the new and old testament.

My point was just to point out how rediculous that graph was.

The introduction of sin was a result of the "serpant" tricking eve into eating from the tree of knowledge.

what? when does this happen? examples?

if a Christian bombs an abortion clinic, chances are that it is a fairly direct result of their Christianity, but I've never seen a general murder by a Christian be said to be caused by their Christianity

do you have proof to back up this statement?

I know, and it's another example of this ridiculous "blame the tool" thing.

The vast majority of killers are religious. An outlier like Stalin isn't especially relevant to that.

But there are a few questions to answer here. One of the first being, was Stalin ever exposed to religion? If so, there you have it - if not, would exposure to religion have prevented Stalin's actions? Etc.

That's, again, because a very tiny number of atheists managed to kill a lot of people. Most of the killers have been religious. I mean, we could say this only indicates that atheists are smarter about killing, and thus more efficient.

It's not just when someone who claims to be a Christian kills, it's when someone claims to kill because of Christianity. But there are different ways to evaluate this.

Again, these difficulties dissolve when we look at ideology - all the greatest killers were ideologues. Thus, we can determine that ideology plays a role in atrocities. Since religion is a form of ideology, it's indicted on that basis.

the bible.

why can i not say this? does mans inability to comprehend something mean that it is incomprehensible?

there are a lot of things in science that we cannot answer yet, does that mean that there is no answer?