The Death Toll of Atheist Regimes vs Christian Theocracies...

[Outcast9428]

I'm so sick of hearing people whine about the supposed tyranny of Christian theocracies. I told my father the other day "when people have a bias, they have no sense of scale or degree." And this is very true when talking about how horrible Christian theocracies supposedly were. The enemies of Christianity will point to all these events in Christian history as evidence for why Christian theocracy is so horrible. Yet they never keep the big picture in mind.

Christian theocracy was in place in Europe from approximately 500 AD to 1700 AD. That's about 1,200 years of Christian rule over almost the entire continent of Europe. How long have state atheist regimes been around? Not very long, only about 100 years with the Soviet Union emerging at the end of WW1. If one really wants to compare and contrast the morality of each system. One ought to look at how bad is the death toll of each system? Collectively? Because humans are flawed, even the best systems can kill people. Lots of people like to talk about how democracy is infallible but the Greeks during the Peloponnesian war voted to have an entire city that rebelled against the Delian league slaughtered. That's tens of thousands of people deliberately killed in one day by a democracy. So yes, any system is capable of mass murder, but how many people have been killed by Christian regimes in episodes of ideologically based mass murder vs how many people have been killed by state atheist regimes in ideologically based mass murder? How many have died because of wars caused by these ideologies?

I will mention, I am not going to include disease or famine deaths... I have personally never liked it when historical statisticians included deaths from disease or famine as part of "regime atrocities" or "war casualties." When a broad range of casualties is given, I simply assumed the middle half of the range to be true. Anyway, let's look at the Christian death toll first. This is not an exhaustive list, as there are too many small incidents that may have occurred which could have killed some 200 or 300 people but I can't find all of them so I'm mainly looking at the large events and aggregated events (like the witch trials) to create a rough estimate of how many people have died in total from Christian ideological violence.

- Saxon wars, including the massacre at Verden by Charlemagne - 8,500
- The Crusades (including the Albigensian Crusade and various crusades against Pagans in Northern and Eastern Europe) - 2 million (500,000 in the Albigensian Crusade)
- Spanish Inquisition - 3,000
- Portuguese inquisition - 2,000
- Roman inquisition - 1,200
- The Witch Trials - 40,000
- Queen Mary I's persecution of English Protestant's - 300
- French Wars of Religion - 300,000 (due to military action)
- Thirty Years War - 600,000 (due to military action)

Total: 2.955 million killed.

We can go ahead and bump that up to about 3 million though to account for countless small events that I wouldn't have time to find. Overall, Christian ideological violence has probably killed about 3 million people from 500 AD to 1700 AD.

Rough estimate of Atheist ideological violence:

- Russian Civil War and the Red Terror - 2 million
- Total deaths from Stalin's purges and executions in gulags - 4 million
- Chinese civil war - 3 million killed either in military combat or intentionally killed by the Communists
- Mao's Land reformations - 5 million killed
- Mao's Laogai camps - 15 million killed
- Mao's Cultural Revolution - 3.5 million
- Korean War - 2 million
- Vietnam War - 2 million
- Cambodian genocide - 2 million
- Cambodian-Vietnamese war - 250,000
- Laotian civil war - 50,000
- Afghanistan War - 500,000 killed specifically by the Communist regime
- Fidel Castro's regime - 70,000

Total: 39.4 million killed.

Once again, this list isn't exhaustive either... There have been countless guerrilla movements around the world which have started minor insurgencies, I also didn't include any deaths caused by the Soviet Union after Stalin because there is no information on that.

What's important to note, however, is that Atheist zealots have killed 13x more people then Christian zealots have with 12x less time to do so. Overall, Atheist zealotry is 156x more deadly then Christian zealotry is. And before anybody tries to make a population argument and say its because of the population difference... Well that certainly didn't stop the Tang Dynasty during the An Lushan Rebellion in the 8th Century AD from slaughtering 13 million people in 7 years. In 7 years, they killed over 4x as many people as all the Christian zealots of 1,200 years combined managed to kill. The Mongol Empire who existed in the same time period as the Christians did but ruled for a much shorter period of time killed somewhere between 10-20 million people in the approximately 200 years of their existence. Attilla the Hun razed 100 Roman cities to the ground and butchered their entire populations. He is estimated to have killed millions of people.

Basically, pre-industrial regimes were perfectly capable of slaughtering huge numbers of people if they really wanted to even despite the comparatively low population of the time period. The comparative lack of extreme mass murder under Christian theocracies can only be explained by pointing to Christian morality and ethics, which commanded an unprecedented ability to restrain violence in the territories under Christian rule.