"It is estimated that in the past 100 years, governments under the banner of atheistic communism have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 and 259,432,000 human lives.[2] Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987.

The ex-atheist Theodore Beale notes concerning atheism and mass murder:

“ Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao …

The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot. For every Pol Pot whose infamous name is still spoken with horror today, there was a Mengistu, a Bierut, and a Choibalsan, godless men whose names are now forgotten everywhere but in the lands they once ruled with a red hand.

Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation![4]"

http://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism_statistics



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 09:43PM by Amyjo.

The 20th Century was a very bloody one. A larger world population, more powerful war technology, and some especially evil dictators and ideologies.

AmyJo, you might check out "The Black Book of Communism."

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483335583&sr=1-1&keywords=black+book+of+communism

Everybody decries Hitler, and are quick to compare their most detested politician to him (left and right wings, both). I believe he came in only 3rd on the Mass Murder list. I believe the nearious ranking is:

1) Mao Zedong (aprox. 80M, almost all Chinese)
2) Stalin 50-70 M(Russians, Germans, Ukranians, various Asians)
3) Hitler 8-9M (Jews, Gypsies, Allied POWs, homosexuals, JWs, Russians and other Slavs)
4) King Leopold (Congolese Africans, estimates range 5-15M
5) Pol Pot (3-4 M), his own Cambodians

And let's not forget Castro and other sundry villains. Now we have Islamicists to add to the list, but they are comprised of many factions.

The numbers are shocking.

The reality is such that the potential to inflict far worse human casualties exist today than they did during Mao Tse Tung's reign of terror, or Stalin's.

There's the saying, "Those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.." should be the alarm cry IMO.

they didn't kill in the name of atheism they killed for a political ideology. The difference as I see it is theists kill in the name of there religion or ideology. No one kills for a non-belief. They just happened to be atheists.

They killed in the name of an ideology of which atheism was a major component. Claims/goals of egalitarianism, class/racial elitism, dialectical materialism, "inevitable" political destiny also showed up, but almost all of them (including National Socialism*) rejected Deity in general, and Christianity in particular.

*Something which gets insufficient attention is the occultic beliefs of the top Nazi leadership.

So what? I duh it matters o their victims and many of them persecuted religion.

"Hitler, Stalin, Mao = Atheist mass murderers?"
"Skeptical Science "
12 July 2011

"There exists a very tedious theist argument that keeps popping up,and no matter how many times you kill it, it keeps coming back, in fact its almost akin to a game of whack-a-mole at times. It goes like this …

"'Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were atheists, they all were responsible for terrible mass murder; therefore, atheism is responsible for terrible mass murder.'

"Do serious christians really take this line? You bet they do. To find an example, . . . read the article in the 'Christan Science Monitor' by the bestselling author, Dinesh D’Souza, that takes this precise line …

"'In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.'

"OK then, the way to really address this is to start by identifying the logical fallacy. Its called 'Post hoc ergo propter hoc,' and that Latin phrase means 'after this, therefore because of this.' What does this really mean? Well, its a way of pointing out that sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that something is responsible for causing something else, when in reality there is no connection at all. For example, if I step out into my yard and cut the grass and it then starts to rain, “Ah ha, evidence … quite clearly cutting grass causes rain”.It is easy for any of us to make such a leap, here is another example:

"Fanatical believer shoots his wife – 'Ah,'say the non-believers, 'Proof that religious people do bad things.' But in reality it might not have been belief or non-belief, just a couple who got into a shouting match, then into the heat of the moment he looses his rag, pulls a gun, … bang. No connection to the fact that he is a believer. You can reverse the roles if you like, what if he was a non-believer? If he had been, then the you can bet you would have believers citing it as an example of the wickedness of non-belief.

"The key is to ask yourself what the driving force was; belief, non-belief, or something else. Please make no mistake, there are cases where fanatical belief is indeed the root cause, you don’t need to think too hard to cobble up a couple of examples:

-"9/11

-"shooting a doctor for performing an abortion

-"stonings

-"Apparent political assassination in Pakistan that are carried out by religious fanatics
etc …

"OK then, lets move on and tackle the big three.

"Hitler – the atheist tyrant, as D’Souza called him, intent upon creating a religion-free utopia. Really!! … that claim has a couple of flaws. The most notable is that Hitler was not an Atheist, he was Catholic. Hitler frequently spoke positively about the Christian German culture, and his belief in the “Aryan” Christ. He also remained a formal member of the Catholic Church until his death. In 'Mein Kampf ' Hitler speaks of the 'creator of the universe” and “eternal Providence.' And as for his supposed plans to create a religion-free utopia, utter bollocks – Hitler often associated atheism with Germany’s communist enemy, and not as a goal. In a speech delivered in Berlin, October 24, 1933, Hitler stated: 'We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out“. During negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of April 26, 1933 Hitler argued that “Secular schools can never be tolerated.'

"Atheist Tyrant? … er no, not one jot of evidence exists for that claim.

"Stalin – Most definitely a tyrant, no doubt of that, and also one that openly opposed religion. Now this is where we come to our 'Post hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy … 'Stalin was not a believer, Stalin killed millions, therefore atheism caused the death of millions,' The fundamental flaw here is that Stalin was in fact a believer, a fanatical Marxist believer – he personally led the Russian revolution in 1917 alongside Lenin and so he created his own myth. The cause of all that happened and all that followed was not non-belief, but rather was rooted within the combination of his fanatical Marxist idology, his unstable personality, and also his ambition and lust for total power. In fact by 1922 Lenin came to realise that Stalin was too unstable and wanted him removed, but due to his stroke was unable to do this. So what was the root cause, what really made him tick inside …non-belief? No quite clearly not, Stalin was in fact a psychopath, with a lust for power who rose high enough to be able to leverage total control and then proceeded to eliminate any and all opposition.

"Mao Zedong -Yes, another fanatical Marxist and also a non-believer whose Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are blamed for millions of deaths. He demonstrated an astonishing disregard for individual human lives and repeatedly affirmed his willingness to sacrifice up to a third of the Chinese population in a nuclear war, an utter fanatic devoted to grasping, then consolidating total power and imposing his ideology upon all, driven not by non-belief, but by a belief in himself and his personality cult.

"So where does all this lead us? its simple really, Atheism doesn’t kill people, Fanaticism kills people, be that religious or political.

"So what really is the root cause behind all that Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other similar tyrants did? All of them have one common cause, in each instance they were psychopaths. Note that I’m not using that as a form of insult, I’m giving you a diagnosis. A psychopath is somebody who manifests superficial charm, Grandiose sense of self-worth, is cunning and manipulative, lacks remorse or guilt, is callous, has a lack of empathy, and fails to accept responsibility for their own actions.

"Religion does indeed stand guilty of some truly hideous crimes and a direct root cause within a delusional belief can indeed be established (think 9/11 as an example), but the attempt to put a lack of belief in the dock on the basis that some fanatical psychopaths committed truly hideous crimes on an industrial scale is simply an instance of the “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy, the root cause was their Psychopathy."

http://www.skeptical-science.com/atheism/hitler-stalin-mao-atheist-mass-murderers/



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 08:52AM by steve benson.

I second Steve.

From the article posted by Steve:

"Atheism doesn’t kill people, Fanaticism kills people, be that religious or political."

That makes a lot of sense to me.

I agree completely. One can find plenty of atheists throughout history who would not harm a butterfly, and plenty of Christians, Muslims, and the Buddhists, etc. who would do likewise. The common denominator between Christianity's genocidal sins and those of communism is the lust for power coupled with a fanatical desire to impose an ideology. I'm not sure I would cede the numbers game to the communists, when one considers the genocide which occurred all across North, Central and South America, which was carried out by Christians. Likewise there are other groups across the world who were proselytized at the point of the sword. The rape of Africa, although not specifically a religious endeavor, was certainly aided and abetted by those who believed that they were doing God's work by bringing Western civilization to the peoples of Africa, which also resulted in the death of thousands, if not millions. As for Hitler, I agree that he was Catholic and never abandoned his Catholicism. One can add to this argument the fact that he load the Jews and sought to remove them from the face of the earth, which is a basic Christian tenant. So the argument could be made with regard to Hitler that he was following the dictates of Christianity and its scapegoating of Jews for the death of Christ.

The 20th century was a time when one man could kill many millions. It was also a time when one man could save many millions. There were times that avoiding nuclear Armageddon came down to one man disobeying orders to launch. Unfortunately, we don't know the religious beliefs of such people.

I think it was ideologies rather than religion per se that caused the problem. When I was a kid, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland were killing each other. Unless I'm misreading the New Testament, that wasn't religion, it was ideology. Which brings me to Mormonism, which is highly ideological. There's no way in hell Christ would approve of the church's coercive tactics. But those immersed in it can't see that. The story of Laban is about the ends justifying the means, and the Mormons take that to heart.

A parasite that doesn't kill its host is better than outright murder, but I'm not sure the long term effect of hijacking human lives is much different. As far as I'm concerned, they damn near killed me.

Not all Protestants and Catholics were at each other's throats and killing each other as you glibly state.
The violence was carried out by a very small minority but like all things evil, media liked to paint its own picture and evil makes the best news.
Most of the violence was political and the best part of that was to advance organized crime.
The vast majority of Protestants and Catholics lived peacefully together. In the areas were groups were polarized like the Protestant slums and Catholic ghettos ignorance of the other group living in separate groups only yards apart and aligned in what could be called Protestant and Catholic areas caused the criminal elements to rule by fear. By causing the polarization of communities they perpetuated the violence. Like Mormonism that likes to isolate itself from reasonable civilization and rules itself by fear, lies and fraud.
I cannot recall any acts of violence perpetrated by atheists in Ireland.

"Who Kills More, Religion or Atheism?: Has religion or atheism been responsible for the greater death toll throughout human history?"

by Brian Dunning
"Skeptoid Media," Podcast #76
27 November 2007

"Religion vs. Atheism

"Hide that Bible in your pocket as the guard hustles you down the snowy road on your way to eventual death in Stalin's Gulag, for today's subject is the debate over whether more people throughout history have been killed in the name of religion, or in the name of atheism.

"Atheist authors like Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, and Sam Harris are always debating religious authors like Dinesh D'Souza, William Dembski, and Alister McGrath about whether or not God exists, or whether or not religion is good for the world. And, as predictably as the sun rises, these debates nearly always devolve into the argument of which side is responsible for the greatest death toll throughout history. Which is a more terrible killer: religious fundamentalism, or the lack of religion?

"Christians charge that the most killing in history has come from modern atheist regimes. Adolf Hitler led Germany during World War II when he executed six million Jews in the Holocaust, three million Poles, three million Russian prisoners of war, and as many as eight million others throughout Europe. Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution until his death after World War II. Between 10 and 20 million Soviets and German prisoners of war died under his regime, depending on how many famine victims you count, from Gulags, execution, and forced resettlement. Mao Zedong, who led China for more than a quarter of a century following World War II, created the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution programs which collectively killed unknown tens of millions of Chinese, most of them in public executions and violent clashes. Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970's, when as many as 2 million Cambodians, or as much as 20% of the population, died from execution, disease and starvation.

"History is full of uncounted massacres by armies carrying a religious banner, though most such episodes were in ancient times with much less efficient killing technology and microscopically smaller populations. The number of religious exterminations of entire villages throughout history is innumerable, though most had body counts only in the hundreds or thousands. Alexander the Great is estimated to have executed a million. 11th century Crusades killed half a million Jews and Muslims. Genghis Khan's massacres of entire populations of cities probably totaled a million. The Aztecs once slaughtered 100,000 prisoners over four days. An unknown number, probably in the millions, died in the Devil's Wind action in Colonial India. Up to four million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims died in post-Colonial India. The Ottoman Empire massacred two million Armenians over the years. Franco's Spanish Civil War killed a hundred thousand. A million have died in Rwanda, half a million in Darfur. And Christian vs. Muslim violence has obviously dominated our headlines for a decade, totaling somewhere in seven figures.

"So, who has been the worst throughout history: atheist regimes or religious regimes? Obviously the big numbers come from the 20th century superpowers (China, Russia, Germany) so the answer depends on how you classify those. And this is where the meat of these debates is usually found, splitting hairs on which regime is atheist, which is merely secular, which is non-Christian and thus fair game to be called atheist. Hitchens points out that Stalin's government had all the trappings of religion, including Orwell's totalitarian theocracy, and thus it's merely a play on words to say that it was not religious. Pol Pot was raised a Buddhist monk who grew up to execute Buddhist monks, along with anyone else he could lay his hands on. Whole books have been written on the occult underpinnings of Nazi Germany, the symbology of the Norse gods, to say nothing of the claims that Hitler was a Christian, Hitler was a Jew, and his own writings expressing the kinship he felt with the Muslims. A favorite counterpoint raised by Christian debaters is that these despots practiced Social Darwinism and were thus atheists by definition.

"In summary, the winner of these debates is the one who can convince the other that the big 20th century genocidal maniacs were motivated either by religion or by a desire to destroy religion. The entire debate is the logical fallacy of the excluded middle.

"Here's the thing. If you write a book called God Is Not Great: 'How Religion Poisons Everything,' you sell a lot of books. If you write a book called 'What's So Great About Christianity' on the evils of atheism, you also sell a lot of books. If you say that neither extremist viewpoint makes any sense, you end up doing a podcast and working as a greeter at Wal-Mart directing customers to the section where they sell Hitchens and D'Souza books. The truth is less incisive, it's less inflammatory, it raises no ire, and it draws no audience.

"And that truth, as I've said time and time again, is that people are people. No matter what segment of society you look at, you'll find good people and you'll find bad people. You'll even find, as has been said, that the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. Certainly there are people in the news who kill in the name of religion, but just because they kill in the name of religion doesn't really mean they kill because of religion. The Islamic militants who cut off Nick Berg's head are not nice men who would have otherwise been his best friend, if it weren't for their religious convictions forcing them into this grievous act. They are base murderers, and they should be punished accordingly, I don't care whether they go to church or not. Killers don't really kill because of their religion. Neither does a lack of religious convictions cause one to run wild in the streets with a bloody axe and a torch. Religion is a convenient banner for many to carry, but there are plenty of other banners available as well, and if it wasn't religion, they'd do their deeds under some other justification, if they care to even have one. The real reason they do their evil deeds is that they're human. Humans are very smart, very capable; and when we want something, we generally find some way to get it, even if that means killing someone or committing genocide.

"By doing this episode, I'm going to be called an apologist for atheist genocide. My dismissal of the entire argument as pointless and fallacious will be interpreted as a dodge from advocating a weak position. So go ahead and post that as a comment on Skeptoid.com, if you're still convinced that this is argument that can ever have a useful conclusion. I'm convinced that arguing either side is merely an opportunistic way to tingle sensitive nerves and sell a lot of books. And, I'm convinced that any discussion of the religious causes of genocide is a divisive distraction from the more worthwhile investigation into the true cultural and psychological causes. We are human beings, and we need to understand our human motivations.

"So, I am no longer going to participate in the childish debate of what religion has killed more people in history, because it doesn't matter. The way I see it, you might as well debate what color underpants are worn by the largest number of killers, and try to draw a causal relationship there as well. Religion does not cause you to kill people, and it certainly doesn't prevent you from killing people. Let's stop pretending that it does either."

Dunning, B. "Who Kills More, Religion or Atheism?" Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, 27 Nov 2007. Web. 1 Jan 2017. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4076



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 01:45AM by steve benson.

Steve, we once again want to thank you for your uncanny ability to locate sources that seem to elude the vast majority of mainstream academia. As ex-Mormons, we truly appreciate truths that are obscure and supported by such quality resources.

Many serious academics shy away from citing Dunning due to his conviction on wire fraud and subsequent prison stint. But I'm with you, even convicted felons should have a place at the academic table.

Now, granted Dunning is "Chancellor" of the non-accredited "Thunderwood College," but he does claim it's merely a parody of diploma mills while it serves as a diploma mill.

Steve, I think I speak for all of us when I express our gratitude. We come from a tradition that will cite obscure and even discredited sources to support their inane beliefs, and you've shown us there is a far better way.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 03:56AM by Tall Man, Short Hair.

Thanks for the surprising information on Dunning's now-defunct non-accredited outfit.

I would not be surprised if, had you been given the chance, you would have set up your own Jesus U. (accredited, of course), one that, alas, would most likely have been destined to go out of business once it was discovered that Jesus never existed.

Imagine, though, the possibilities:

It could have offered specialized curricula in quantum physics creationism (a notion you were not too long ago promoting on RfM via linkage to a woo-woo internet video. Do a board history search to refresh your memory, if needs be).

To think that you might also have included a course ridiculing the notion of worm-eating worms living before The Flood (again, check RfM for your recent post attacking controversial research on these critters)

Had you been given the chance, maybe you could have also included a class on how the earth was created in six days--by you--when it was discovered that Jesus was never around to have done it himself (despite your dubious RfM claim that the Roman historian Taticus identified Jesus as having lived, although that's not what Taticus actually said; he was simply reporting on early Christian myths claiming Jesus lived).

Had there been a Jesus U law school, you might have been able to offer graduate coursework focusing on preventing lawsuit filings against both the fictional Jesus and the fictional Santa, as such action represents persecution of Christian holiday merry-making. (You, no doubt, recall your recent RfM post in that regsrd, in which you falsely asserted that I was busy during the Xmas season filing lawsuits against Jesus and Santa promotionals, when all I was doing was doodling cartoons for my newspaper).

What could have been . . .

Oh well, to use your words, "once again we thank you for your uncanny ability to elude" your own record of nonesense. Indeed, to again borrow from your eloquence, "I think I speak for all of us when I express our gratitude. We come from a tradition that will cite obscure and even discredited sources [like I, 'Tall Man, Short Hair,' so often do] to support [my] inane beliefs."

How true. You cettainly do. Thanks for the compliment. I'm here to help anytime you need it, whether you recognize it or not.

Now, carry on with your good fight against atheist cartoonists who are wreaking blood and horror upon this earth. :)



Edited 10 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 09:30PM by steve benson.

That's a nice bit of philosophy, but what of the Milgram experiment? According to science, chances are more likely than not that you would have participated in these gruesome atrocities had you been there. Authoritarian control structures, whether religious or not, absolve individuals (at least in their minds) of moral responsibility.

"The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy – Hitler, Stalin & Pol Pot"

By Michael A. Sherlock (Author)

"In Memory of Christopher Hitchens

"Religious apologists, particularly those of the Christian variety, are big fans of what I have dubbed, the atheist atrocities fallacy. Christians commonly employ this fallacy to shield their egos from the harsh reality of the brutality of their own religion, by utilizing a most absurd form of the tu quoque ('you too') fallacy, mingled with numerous other logical fallacies and historical inaccuracies. Despite the fact that the atheist atrocities fallacy has already been thoroughly exposed by Hitchens and other great thinkers, it continues to circulate amongst the desperate believers of a religion in its death throes. Should an atheist present a believer with the crimes committed by the Holy See of the Inquisition(s), the Crusaders and other faith-wielding misanthropes, they will often hear the reply; 'Well, what about Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler? They were atheists, and they killed millions!'

"Given the obstinate nature of religious faith and the wilful ignorance it cultivates in the mind of the believer, I am quite certain that this article will not be the final nail in this rancid and rotting coffin. Having said this, I do hope it will contribute to the arsenal required by those who value reason, facts and evidence, in their struggle against the fallacies perpetually flaunted by those who do not value the truth above their own egocentric delusions, delusions inspired by an unquenchable thirst for security, no matter how frighteningly false its foundation.

"Before addressing the primary weaknesses of the atheist atrocities fallacy itself, I would like to attend to each of these three homicidal stooges; Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler, who are constantly trotted out to defend a religious worldview. I will lend Hitler the most time, as the claim that he was an atheist represents a most egregious violation of the truth.

"HITLER

“'Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.' [1] ~Adolf Hitler

"'We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out.' [2] ~Adolf Hitler

"Hitler was a Christian. This undeniable fact couldn’t be made any clearer than by his own confessions. Yet, I will not merely present you with these testimonies, as damning as they happen to be on their own, but I also intend on furnishing you with a brief history of the inherent anti-Semitism of the Christian religion. I will do so to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Hitler and his Christian Nazi Party were acting in complete concordance with traditional Christian anti-Semitism.

"To begin, here are just a few of Hitler’s Christian confessions:

“'My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.' [3]

“'The greatness of Christianity did not arise from attempts to make compromises with those philosophical opinions of the ancient world which had some resemblance to its own doctrine, but in the unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defense of its own teaching.'[4]

“'His [the Jew’s] life is of this world only and his mentality is as foreign to the true spirit of Christianity as is character was foreign to the great Founder of this new creed two thousand years ago. And the Founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of His estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing their commercial interests. But at that time Christ was nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews…' [5]

"Over and above these solid testimonies, there are other equally strong pieces of evidence that indicate that Hitler was a Christian, like the fact that his soldiers all wore the slogan, ‘Gott Mit Uns’ (God with us) on their belts, that his birthday was 'celebrated from the pulpits until his death,' as Hitchens so eloquently put it, and that the Nazis published their own slightly revised Christian bible. [6] As the late great Hitchens has already addressed many of these uncomfortable facts, I would now like to move onto an assessment of the Nazi’s horrendous treatment of the Jews in light of Christian history.

"Christian anti-Semitism (From the Beginning of the Christian Era)

“'His blood be upon us [Jews] and our children' ~'Matthew' 27:25

"Prior to Constantine’s legitimization of the Christian religion in the fourth century, Christian anti-Semitism was confined to the canonical and non-canonical works of Christian authors and Church fathers. From the fifth century onward, the fantasies of the ante-Nicene fathers began to manifest into brutal violence.

"In the first volume of my three volume book series, (I Am Christ), I trace the concentration camps of World War II all the way back to the Gospel of 'John.' In that book, I said:

"From all of the evidence available in the volumes of historical works, both Christian and non-Christian, it is clear that there is an unbroken chain of hatred, intolerance, and racism toward the Jews, which began with “John’s” Gospel (see also the Synoptic gospels) and continued all the way down into the twentieth century, ending with Hitler’s bloody campaign against the Church’s most despised enemies. [7]

"More than a few bible scholars have made mention of the virulent anti-Semitism of John’s gospel. This anonymous and falsely named piece of work goes beyond its synoptic counterparts (Matthew, Mark and Luke) to directly accuse the Jewish people of being the 'sons of Satan' (John 8:44), thereby demonizing the Jewish people and opening the door to a millennia of Jewish suffering at the hands of credulous Christian maniacs.

"In Porter’s "'Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation,' Porter notes:

"'…particularly within the post-Holocaust growing sensitivity to the history and consequences of Christian anti-Judaism, has been the concern about the anti-Judaism or even (potential) anti-Semitism of the [John’s] Gospel; its characteristic antithetical use of "the Jews" (NB 8:34–47), hardly neutralized by appeals to 3:16 and 4:22, has earned it the epithet "the father of the anti-Semitism of the Christians": (Bieringer 2001)'. [8]

"Some scholars have sought to make sense of the anti-Semitic rhetoric in John by way of a historical exegesis of the text. At around the time John was written, toward the end of the first century, Christians were being expelled from the Synagogues for the heresy of worshipping a false messiah. [9] It was at this moment in history, many speculate, Christianity broke completely away from its parent religion, Judaism.

"In Robert Kysar’s 'Voyages with John,' he enunciates the anti-Semitism within the Johannine community and also looks at some of the theories that have sought to explain the context of the origins of anti-Jewish racism amongst Christians in general, saying:

"Over twelve years ago Samuel Sandmel correctly observed, 'John is widely regarded as either the most anti-Semitic or at least the most overtly anti-Semitic of the gospels.' Little has been done to ameliorate that harsh judgment since it was first written. While efforts have been made to soften the impact of the tone of John when it comes to Jews and Judaism, the fact remains that a reading of the gospel tends to confirm Sandmel’s judgment. Still, recent theories for understanding the historical setting of the writing of the Fourth Gospel do offer some ways of interpreting the harshness with which the gospel treats Jews and Judaism. Such theories do not change the tone of the gospel but offer a way of explaining that tone. [10]

"The historical setting Kysar was referring to pertained to the expulsion of the Johannine Christians from the Synagogues, as he explains in the following words:

"'An increasingly clear picture emerges from all these studies grounded in the hypothesis that the gospel was written in response to the exclusion of the Johannine church from the synagogue and the subsequent dialogue between these two religious parties. The subject of the picture is a defensive and threatened Christian community, attempting to reshape its identity isolated from the synagogue and its Jewish roots.' [11]

"But Christian anti-Semitism cannot be laid solely on the shoulders of the anonymous author of John, as the passion narratives contained in all four gospels were also co-conspirators in the crimes committed against Jewish families. To illustrate this fact we have the testimonies of various Church fathers.

“'He (Jesus Christ) made known the one and only true God, His Father, and underwent the passion, and endured the cross at the hands of the Christ-killing Jews…' [12] ~Ignatius of Antioch (2nd Century Apostolic Father)

"Further, the second century Church father and apologist Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with the Jewish philosopher Trypho, said:

“'For other nations have not inflicted on us and on Christ this wrong to such an extent as you have, who in very deed are the authors of the wicked prejudice against the Just One, and us who hold by Him. For after that you had crucified Him, the only blameless and righteous Man,– through whose stripes those who approach the Father by Him are healed, –when you knew that He had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, as the prophets foretold He would, you not only did not repent of the wickedness which you had committed…' [13]

"Going into the fifth Christian century, the racism of the Church continued with Pope Leo 'the Great' who, in an Easter Sermon on the Passion of Christ, exhorted:

“'And when morning was come all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death.” This morning, O ye Jews, was for you not the rising, but the setting of the sun, nor did the wonted daylight visit your eyes, but a night of blackest darkness brooded on your naughty hearts. This morning overthrew for you the temple and its altars, did away with the Law and the Prophets, destroyed the Kingdom and the priesthood, turned all your feasts into eternal mourning. For ye resolved on a mad and bloody counsel, ye “fat bulls,” ye “many oxen,” ye “roaring” wild beasts, ye rabid “dogs,” to give up to death the Author of life and the LORD of glory; and, as if the enormity of your fury could be palliated by employing the verdict of him, who ruled your province, you lead Jesus bound to Pilate’s judgment, that the terror-stricken judge being overcome by your persistent shouts, you might choose a man that was a murderer for pardon, and demand the crucifixion of the Saviour of the world.' [14]

"Also in the fifth century, John Chrysostom, a most vile and capricious Church father, in his work, Orations Against The Jews, wrote:

"And the Jews are more savage than any highwaymen; they do greater harm to those who have fallen among them. They did not strip off their victim’s clothes nor inflict wounds on his body as did those robbers on the road to Jericho. The Jews have mortally hurt their victim’s soul, inflicted on it ten thousand wounds, and left it lying in the pit of ungodliness.[15]

"Although I have only provided a few of the litany of examples available, anti-Semitic rhetoric permeated the very fabric of Christian history and was eventually the inspiration for the founder of the Protestant Church, Martin Luther, who told Protestant Christians that they would be at fault if they didn’t slaughter Jews. [16]

"Further still, citing Luther’s own words from his polemic, On the Jews and their Lies, and the work of one of Luther’s biographers, Robert Michael, who documented various speeches spewed into the ears of Luther’s listeners, we suffer the following racist profanities:

“'The Jews are a base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.' [17] They are full of the “devil’s faeces …which they wallow in like swine.” [18] The synagogue was a “defiled bride, yes, an incorrigible whore and an evil slut …” [19] He argues that their synagogues and schools be set on fi re, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, [20] afforded no legal protection, [21] and these 'poisonous envenomed worms' should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time. [22]

"In Louis A. Ruprecht Jr’s 'This Tragic Gospel – How John Corrupted the Heart of Christianity' he remarks on the similarity between Luther’s hatred of the Jews and the racist rhetoric of John’s gospel, saying:

"'First, then, to his declaration of war on Jews, Luther ’s evolving anti-Semitism is legendary and assuredly represents one of the darkest chapters in this polemicist ’ s long career. Luther argues against the Jews precisely as John’s Jesus did.' [23]

"Having successfully connected the anti-Semitism of John to the founder of the Protestant Church, all we need do now is establish a connection between Luther’s racism and Hitler’s.

"To confirm this association, I call upon the testimony of the former Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, William Inge. The late Dean said of the atrocities committed by Hitler and his Nazi Party:

“'If we wish to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought on the world, I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country, is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.' [24]

"But this is just one learned man’s opinion, right? Wrong. Numerous scholars and commentators have remarked on the Lutheran origin of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, no less Hitler himself:

"'The great protagonists are those who fight for their ideas and ideals despite the fact that they receive no recognition at the hands of their contemporaries. They are the men whose memories will be enshrined in the hearts of the future generations….To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have such men as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.' [25]

"Despite the overwhelming evidence that Hitler and his Nazi Party were heavily influenced by Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic teachings, and the present consensus amongst historical scholars, which rests upon this mountain of evidence,[26] a handful of Christian scholars have sought in vain to draw petty distinctions between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and Martin Luther’s.

"Martin Brecht, for example, argued that there was a vast difference between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and Martin Luther’s. For Luther, Brecht argued, the rejection of Christ was the significant source of contempt, whereas for Hitler it was purely racial. [27] Yet such hollow distinctions are washed away not only by the wealth of evidence indicating the Nazi’s admiration for Luther, but the direct influence that Christian anti-Semitism had on Hitler and his Christian Nazi Party.

"Notwithstanding his honesty, the good Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral was too short-sighted to see, lest admit, that the roots of violent anti-Semitism didn’t begin with Martin Luther, but in the very building blocks of his beloved religion. Was he ignorant of the vile and racist words of Justin Martyr, John Chrysostom and the majority of bigoted Christian fathers, who all railed against the Jews with the ferocious fervour of Hitler himself? Did he not read of the atrocities committed by St. Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century that saw Jewish families put to the sword? Surely he had read of the Crusaders’ barbarism toward the Jews along the road to their bloodthirsty war with the equally bloodthirsty Muslims of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and all of the countless anti-Semitic edicts enunciated by Church councils throughout the centuries, edicts all based upon the very foundations of a rotten and racist religion.

"Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. Matthew 8:17-20

"Presented in the illuminating light of its proper historical context, one can see that the rotten fruit of Nazi anti-Semitism was born from Hitler’s conviction in his Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ, and the poisonous tree of the Christian religion.

"STALIN

"Of these three characters, Stalin was the only confirmed atheist, yet Hitchens thoroughly dealt with the religious nature of Stalin’s dictatorship in a manner that has left religious apologists without sufficient reply. Notwithstanding the fact that Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school, and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood, as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny, constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul.

"'Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.' Romans 13:1-2

"Such teachings were the inspirational well from which the Russian Orthodox Church drew their justifications to support this new Tsar, causing the more sensible fringe of the Church to flee to the United States in contravention of St. Paul’s teachings.

"Here then, the central premise of Hitchens’ argument is worthy of reiteration. Had Stalin inherited a purely rational secular edifice, one established upon the ethos espoused by the likes of Lucretius, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Einstein and other free thinking and rational secularists, then the apologist’s argument would hold slightly more weight, but such wasn’t the case. Stalin merely tore the existing religious labels off the Christian Inquisition, the enforcement of Christian orthodoxy, the Crusades, the praising of the priesthood, messianism, and Edenic ideas of a terrestrial religious-styled utopia, and re-branded them with the red of communism. Had this Christian machine not been in place, then it is more than likely Stalin wouldn’t have had the vehicle he needed to succeed in causing so much suffering in the name of his godless religion, Communism.

"To quote Hitchens:

"'For Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whole thing was ultimately a question of power. “How many divisions,” he famously and stupidly inquired, “has the pope?” (The true answer to his boorish sarcasm was, “More than you think.”) Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma, by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables. (Millions of innocents died of gnawing internal pain as a consequence of this “revelation.”) This Caesar unto whom all things were dutifully rendered took care, as his regime became a more nationalist and statist one, to maintain at least a puppet church that could attach its traditional appeal to his.Z' [28]

"I shan’t rehash Hitchens’ arguments in full, but if you would like to learn more about the details of his logically sound and beautifully crafted reply to this fallacious charge, I suggest you read chapter seventeen of his book, ‘God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything.’

"Hitchens was not alone in seeing the parallels between Russia’s old supernatural religion and its new secular one.

"In Emilio Gentile’s ‘Politics as Religion,’ Gentile describes the sacralising of Stalin’s regime in the following words:

"'The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader. After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity.' [29]

"That vast and seemingly bottomless 'reservoir of religious credulity,' as Hitchens so eloquently phrased it, which served to subdue the servile Soviets for hundreds of years beneath the yoke of an equally brutal supernatural religion, was the very fountain of boundless unthinking acquiescence that Stalin, having adorned himself in the Tsar’s clothes, utilized to send countless innocent Russians to their deaths. Where would Stalin have found such docile servitude, servitude that fed the flames of his secular religious tyranny, had Lucretius, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein or Thomas Jefferson bestowed upon these poor religious Russians, their intellectual legacy? To answer in a word, nowhere.

"POL POT

"Pol Pot, possibly not even an atheist, but almost certainly a Buddhist, believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been. His violence, much like the violence of many earlier religionists, wasn’t the result of a lack of belief in a god, whether Zeus, Osiris, Yahweh, or the god-like Buddha of Mahayana Buddhism, but in the megalomaniacal belief that heaven or destiny was guiding him to improve the state of affairs for all those who could be forced to share his misguided utopian delusions. Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.

"In Alexander Laban Hinton’s book, ‘Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide,’ Hinton drew attention to the role that the belief in karma played in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, particularly with regards to the cementation of a docilely accepted social hierarchy, not too dissimilar from Stalin’s ready-made Russian religious tyranny, as well as highlighting the Buddhist origins of Pol Pot’s ideological initiatives.

"Hinton remarks:

"'This [Pol Pot’s regime’s] line of thinking about revolutionary consciousness directly parallels Buddhist thought, with the “Party line” and “collective stand” being substituted for dhamma…One could certainly push this argument further , contending that the Khmer Rouge attempted to assume the monk’s traditional role as moral instructor (teaching their new brand of “mindfulness”) and that DK regime’s glorification of asceticism, detachment, the elimination of attachment and desire, renunciation (of material goods and personal behaviors, sentiments, and attitudes), and purity paralleled prominent Buddhist themes' [30]

"I have only presented a small snippet of the available evidence that points to religion’s role in Pol Pot’s crimes, and there is not one single piece of solid evidence that Pol Pot was an atheist, so let us once and for all dispense with that speculative piece of religious propaganda. Pol Pot spent close to a decade at Catholic school and nearly as long studying at a Buddhist institution, so religious education was something he had in common with both Hitler and Stalin, but I would never use such data-mined facts to assert that religious education invariably inspires tyrants to commit atrocities, although a case for such a proposition could probably be made without committing too many logical and historical inaccuracies. I won’t even bother sharing the un-sourced quote from Prince Norodom Sihanouk that Christians present as “proof” that Pol Pot was an atheist, as its origin is not only dubious, but its contents reflect a belief in heaven, which, if genuine, negates any claim that Pol Pot was an atheist.

"THE ATHEIST ATROCITIES FALLACY

"The atheist atrocities fallacy is a multifaceted and multidimensional monster, comprised of a cocktail of illogically contrived arguments. It is, at its core, a tu quoque fallacy, employed to deflect justified charges of religious violence, by erroneously charging atheism with similar, if not worse, conduct. But it is much more than this, for within its tangled and mangled edifice can be found the false analogy fallacy, the poisoning of the well fallacy, the false cause fallacy, and even an implied slippery slope fallacy.

"Tu quoque ('You To') Fallacy

"'The Tuquoque fallacy is an informal fallacy used to dismiss criticism by means of deflection. [31] Instead of addressing an accusation or charge, the perpetrator of this fallacy will offer an example of their opponent’s alleged hypocrisy with regards to the allegation. This is precisely how Christian apologists employ the atheist atrocities fallacy.

"'To give you an example of this fallacy in action, we need only examine the reply of renowned Christian apologist, Dinesh D’Souza, to charges of religious violence:

"'And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic?' [32]

“'…it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists.' [33] ~Christopher Hitchens

"This fallacy will be often employed with an added sprinkle of one-upmanship, with the apologist using the immense scale of secular atrocities to argue that atheism is worse than religion. However, if we were to honestly calculate those victims of ritual and religious sacrifice across the entire planet, the total number of witches burned and drowned across Europe and in America, the near genocides of the Pacific Islanders by the London Missionary Society, and similar missionary organizations, the dismembered bodies of the Saint Francis Xavier’s Inquisition in Goa, the disembowelled remains of the Anabaptists in Europe, the men, women and children murdered by Muslim conquerors from the Middle-East to Spain, the stoned and strangled blasphemers in Christian states of the past and Muslim ones of the modern age, and all of the unmarked graves of all of the victims of religion, from the dawn of that plague to now, I am quite certain that the numbers game would prove to be an unfruitful one for the desperate apologist.

"This brings us to our next fallacy.

"False Analogy Fallacy

"This fallacy depends upon the existence of an often minor analogous factor, in this case, the belief in god versus a lack of belief in god, god being the analogous component, and extrapolating from this minor analogy, conditions that are alleged to affect both positions, when the truth of the matter happens to be, the two (religion and atheism) are not analogous at all. [34]

"For apologists to overcome the existence of this fallacy, they must show that atheism is a religion, but the very definition of atheism circumvents any such attempt. Atheism, although encompassing varying degrees of disbelief, is not a system of beliefs, but an unsystematic absence of god-belief, that is all. It has no doctrines, traditions and most importantly, no beliefs. Unless there is some secret atheist bible from which Stalin drew inspiration for his crimes, there is absolutely no reason to suggest that his lack of belief in a supernatural deity had anything to do with his messianic and maniacal behaviour.

"This takes us to the next fallacy in this medley of intellectually dishonest apologetics.

"False Cause Fallacy

"The fallacy of false cause occurs whenever the link between premise and conclusion depends on some imagined causal connection that probably does not exist. [35]

"Example 1:

"Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were all non-figure skaters. Therefore we can conclude that not being a figure skater causes a person to commit atrocities.

"Example 2:

"None of these three dictators believed in the existence of leprechauns, hence the lack of belief in leprechauns causes people to commit atrocities.

"The imaginary atheist bible is a great hypothetical answer to this fallacy, yet such a collection of manuscripts does not exist, nor do any unwritten doctrines that a dictator who happens to lack belief in a god would be able to employ to commit such religious-styled atrocities. In the absence of any written or unwritten atheist doctrines, the apologist must show that a lack of belief in god was a causal factor in the atrocities committed, but to do so, they must conversely demonstrate that had these tyrants believed in a god, they wouldn’t have committed such crimes against humanity, which brings us right back to our Christian Inquisitions, Holy Crusades, missionary atrocities and all of the other dirt directly derived from religion that this fallacy attempts to quietly sweep under the rug.

"Poisoning the Well Fallacy

"When someone presents adverse information about, or associates unfavourable characters, characteristics or qualities with, a targeted person, or in this case, worldview (atheism), with the intention of undermining it, this is known as poisoning the well. “Stalin was an atheist, therefore atheism is dangerous.” By associating atheism with these three villains of history, the religious apologist is attempting to throw an unjustified negative light on atheism.

"Aren’t atheists and anti-theists doing the same thing when they associate Christianity with the Spanish Inquisition? No. The Spanish Inquisition was directly caused and inspired by the very foundations of the Christian religion, i.e., the Bible and Church doctrines and traditions. The fallacy doesn’t exist when there is a legitimate association between the poison and its target.

"To give you a hypothetical example of this legitimate association, just imagine that John smith has offered a friend of yours a too-good-to-be-true investment opportunity, and John has previously been convicted of fraud on multiple occasions. If you inform your friend about John’s prior convictions you are not poisoning the well, but stressing a legitimate association between the poison (fraud convictions) and the target (John Smith). Such association is certainly the case with the religious atrocities committed as a direct result of scripture, ecclesiastical edicts, tradition, and clerical authority.

"[Implied] Slippery Slope Fallacy

"The slippery slope fallacy is a species of the false cause fallacy that seeks to present a conclusion of an argument that is dependent upon an unlikely chain of events.

"In 'Hurely’s Concise Introduction to Logic,' he offers the following example:

"'Immediate steps should be taken to outlaw pornography once and for all. The continued manufacture and sale of pornographic material will almost certainly lead to an increase in sex-related crimes such as rape and incest. This in turn will gradually erode the moral fabric of society and result in an increase in crimes of all sorts. Eventually a complete disintegration of law and order will occur, leading in the end to the total collapse of civilization.

"'Because there is no good reason to think that the mere failure to outlaw pornography will result in all these dire consequences, this argument is fallacious.' [36]

"The more we become secularized and the more atheism is allowed to spread, the greater the chance of such horrendous atrocities occurring will be. This is the not so subtle inference of the atheist atrocities fallacy. I won’t bore you with statistics that show societies with higher rates of atheism are generally more peaceful; have higher standards of education, health and personal freedom, [37] as I have already pulled the first proposition in this 'slippery slope' from beneath the starry-eyed apologist’s feet.

"A FINAL WORD

"So, what is the atheist atrocities fallacy, really? It is little more than erroneous historical data wrapped in illogical argumentation and cloaked with the rhetorical garb of apologetic propaganda. Yet and still, above all of this inanity, the atheist atrocities fallacy is the result of a psychological defence mechanism, the aim of which is the distortion of reality for the protection of the hypersensitive religious ego.

"To finish, let me now surrender and admit defeat. You look puzzled. Please lend me just one more moment to explain my surrender.

"Suppose the Christian apologist is correct, and atheist tyrants are worse than religious ones. What does this, from the point of view of the believer, show? What are the implications? On the one hand, you can interpret it to show that the more people believe in the Christian god, the more virtuous they will behave, despite the fact that the truth of history will laugh at such vacuous attempts to ignore its tomes of evidence to the contrary. On the other, what does it say about an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving god, one who allows tyrants, whether secular or religious, to murder helpless and innocent children by the millions, who turns a blind eye to the wrongful imprisonment of innocent men and women, and who starves to bare bones, the poor and meek?

"Perhaps now you see that my surrender was but a Trojan horse, in which I smuggled Epicurus’ old, yet unanswered, problem of evil. I guess I could have just said that there is no way for a religious apologist to win this one. For if the atheist admits defeat, they still leave the faithful with the dissonance of evil, and as many theologians and philosophers have correctly concluded, freewill is no answer to such evil. But that is a story for another time."
-----


Sources

Max Domarus & Patrick Romane. The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary. Bolchazy-Carducci. (2007). P. 499.

Adolf Hitler. Speech in Berlin. October 24, 1933.

Norman H. Baynes. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler. Vol.1. Oxford University Press (1942). pp. 19-20.

Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. Hurst and Blackett Ltd. (1939). p. 275.

Ibid. 240.

Susannah Heschel. The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press. (2008) Chapter 3: Projects of the Institute.

Michael Sherlock. I Am Christ: The Crucifixion – Painful Truths. Charles River Press. (2012). p. 182.

Stanley E. Porter. Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation. Routledge (2007). p. 182.

Lance Byron Richey. Roman Imperial Ideology and the Gospel of John. The Catholic Biblical Association of America. (2007). p. 63.

Robert Kysar. Voyages in John – Charting the Fourth Gospel. Baylor University Press. (2005). p. 147.

p. 153.

The Apostlic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. Justin Martyr (trans. Philip Schaff ) Ignatius Epistle to the Ephesians. Chapter 11. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 107.

Ibid; Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho; Chapter 17. p. 320.

Philip Schaff . Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers: 212: Leo the Great & Gregory the Great. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. (1885). p. 317.

John Chrysostom. Homily 8:3.10.

Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Th eir Lies, cited in Michael.

Robert. “Luther, Luther Scholars, and the Jews,” Encounter 46 (Autumn 1985) No. 4:343-344.

Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, 154, 167, 229, cited in Michael, Robert. Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 111.

p. 113.

p. 112.

Michael, Robert. Luther, Luther Scholars, and the Jews, Encounter 46:4, (Autumn 1985). p. 342.

p. 343.

Luther, Martin. On the Jews and Their Lies, cited in Michael. Robert. Luther, Luther Scholars, and the Jews, Encounter 46 (Autumn 1985) No. 4:343-344.

Louis A. Rupercht Jr. This Tragic Gospel – How John Corrupted the Heart of Christianity. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2008). p. 166.

William R. Inge. Church of England Newspaper. August 4, 1944: cited in; Peter F. Wiener. Martin Luther-Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor. Amer Atheist Press. (1999). inside cover.

Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf. Hurst and Blackett Ltd. (1939). p. 171.

Ronald Berger. Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach. Aldine De Gruyter. (2002). p.28; Paul Lawrence Rose.

Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. Princeton University Press. (1990); quoted in Berger. p. 28; Paul

Johnson. A History of the Jews. HarperCollins Publishers. (1987). p. 242; Leon Poliakov. History of Anti-Semitism: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews. University of Pennsylvania Press. (2003). p. 216; Michael Berenbaum. The World Must Know. Johns Hopkins University Press and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (1993, 2000). pp. 8–9.

Martin Brecht. Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church. Vol. 3. 1532-1546. Fortress Press. (1999). p. 351.

Christopher Hitchens. God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve Books. (2007). pp. 244-245.

Emilio Gentile. Politics as Religion. Princeton University Press. (2006). pp. 41-42.

Nathaniel Bluedorn. The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Six Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning. Christian Logic (2002). p. 54 [Note the irony of the source].

Christopher Hitchens. God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve Books. (2007). p. 230.

Alexander Laban Hinton. Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. University of California Press. (2004). p. 197.

Dinesh D’Souza. Answering Atheist’s Arguments. http://catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0214.htm.

Patrick J. Hurley. A Concise Introduction to Logic. Wadsworth Publishing. (2000). p. 36.

p. 143.

p. 146.

Kerry Walters. Atheism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. (2010). 11.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 07:17PM by steve benson.

Diocletian's Purge
Medieval Spain, Autos de Fe, Persecution and Expulsion of Jews
Conquest Of Mexico
Thirty Year's War
Purge of Japanese Christians
Reign of Terror (French Revolution, Jacobins / Cult of the Supreme Being}
Russian Revolution, Great Purge (Soviet Communism quasi-religion, Stalinism)
Nazi German Genocide (Nazi quasi-religion, Christianity, anti-Semitism)
Communist Chinese Cultural Revolution (Communist quasi-religion)
Khmer Rouge Purges (Communist quasi-religion)

etc, etc, etc...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 04:16AM by anybody.

. . . on several scores.

First, the word "democide" is linguistically silly. "Demos" means "masses" or "the people." So the word actually means "murder by the people" just as democracy means "rule by the people." If you want to stretch things, you could get "murder of the masses" but we already have a word for that: genocide. Rummel is just neologizing to hide the fact that his underlying analysis is risible.

Second, he says that the worst atrocity committed by Christianity was the Spanish Inquisition. Really? What is the basis for that assertion? There are several events that might vie for that status, including the Crusades and certain parts of the colonization process. What Belgium did to the Congo, for instance, was horrific both generally and numerically. But all of those pale in comparison to the Thirty Years War, which was vastly more barbarous and indiscriminate than the Spanish Inquisition.

Third, as presented in that article he completely ignores technology. He compares the inquisition, a 15th century phenomenon, with 20th century atrocities. That makes no sense. He is asking us to believe that the countries involved in the Thirty Years War would have refrained from using weapons of mass destruction if those were available. That is entirely ahistorical. The fact is that all historical mass murderers (Chinggis Khan, Attila the Hun, perhaps the Young Turks) would have achieved similar per capita results to Hitler and Stalin and Mao if they had had modern technology.

Fourth, Rummel ignores the fact that most of the Christian world was rich and stable during the 20th century and most of the pre- and communist countries were deeply riven and tumultuous. You can't meaningfully contrast the two sets of societies. In this respect he might have benefited from analysis of why history played out differently between the two categories. But then again that might not have helped him much since such analysis would have revealed that in some instances Christianity contributed to the upheavals that spawned communism.

Finally, his terms make no sense. Why compare Christianity to atheistic ideologies when the clearer dichotomy would be between religion in general and theistic ideologies. Doesn't Islam count as a theistic religion? Isn't Buddhism a religious phenomenon? What about the Hebrew God of the Old Testament--who is, according to Christians, their God as well? Following that logic, the purported genocides of the Bible would be an important datum. To paraphrase Rummel, in the 10th century BCE the number of theistic murders was greater than communistic murders by a multiple of infinity.

And is it reasonable to compare political ideologies with religions? To do that persuasively, one would need to define both and explain why they motivate different behavior. Yet any definition of religion broad enough to include non-theistic faiths inevitably also encompasses political ideology. All of these systems of thought are faith-based worldviews that posit a historical direction, describe a future towards which all should strive, demand self-sacrifice to that cause, denigrate the "other," and claim to supercede conventional morality. So what exactly is the difference between religion and ideology and why does it matter in terms of human behavior?

A neologism like "democide" may be cute but it doesn't compensate for such stunning analytical oversights. That's presumably why so many of his books were printed by SAGE Publications and Transaction Publishers rather than good university operations. Apparently he doesn't stand up well under peer review.

what kind of moron gets his/her info from conservapedia ?

You asked the wrong question.

Rather ask, where does Conservapedia draw its information from? In this case, it was the work of researcher and professor emeritus, "Rudolph Joseph Rummel (October 21, 1932 – March 2, 2014[1]) was professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government (compare genocide), such as the Stalinist purges and Mao's Cultural Revolution. His research suggests that six times as many people died from democide during the 20th century than in all that century's wars combined.[2] He concluded that democracy is the form of government least likely to kill its citizens and that democracies do not wage war against each other.[3] This is known as the democratic peace theory."

source: Wikipedia.org

The only part of that conservapedia entry that had anything to do with Dr. Rummel is that one statistic on the estimates of deaths under communism. The rest of the claims are not his.

Edited for spelling



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 11:32AM by tokki.

How inconvenient, then, that Hitler rose to power through the democratic process. In January 1933 he became Chancellor exactly as he was supposed to. In that sense the NAZI atrocities were born of democracy. The same is of course of Mussolini, who was immensely popular through most of his time in power.

Hard to believe, I know, but democracies sometimes choose leaders who destroy democratic institutions and impose tyrannies. Really. It happens.

JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION

Predicting Prejudice from Religious
Fundamentalism and Right-Wing
Authoritarianism: A Multiple-Regression
Approach

BRIAN LAYTHE
DEBORAH FINKEL
LEE A. KIRKPATRICK

In a study designed to investigate the respective roles of religious fundamentalism and right-wing
authoritarianism as predictors of prejudice against racial minorities and homosexuals, participants (47 males, 91
females) responded to a series of questionnaire measures of these constructs. Data were analyzed using multiple
regression. Consistent with previous research, authoritarianism was a significant and strong positive predictor of
both forms of prejudice. With authoritarianism statistically controlled, however, fundamentalism emerged as a
significant negative predictor of racial prejudice but a positive predictor of homosexual prejudice. In a second
study, we conducted parallel multiple regressions using the correlations from two previously published studies.
The Study 1 results were replicated exactly, except that fundamentalism was a nonsignificant predictor of homosexual
prejudice. We interpret the results as evidence that Christian fundamentalism consists of a second major component
other than authoritarianism—related to Christian belief content—that is inversely related to some forms of prejudice
(including racial prejudice) but not others (e.g., homosexual prejudice



http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ihansen/JOBSEARCH/ChristiansloveLBGT.pdf



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 10:14AM by anybody.

The reason to be a theist has nothing to do with mass murder.

The reason to be a theist is because one believes that one or more gods exist.

I don't. Does that make me a mass murderer? I doubt it, but it certainly doesn't add anything to the argument for or against the existence of God.

Amyjo, you're putting the cart before the horse.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 11:17AM by getbusylivin.

This isn't a debate between theism and atheism.

It is simply citing statistical evidence that more atheists are responsible for global mass murder and "democide" than any combination of religious forces in the past century.

How is that so?

I don't presume to have all the answers.

It goes without saying one chief reason Communist governments denounce theism and God in the first place is they want no allegiance by the masses to none other than themselves and their demagoguery. Where Communism rules, there is no room for competition with God.

That Atheism and Communism have been a catalyst for democide are not lost on those who study recent history. Or that democracy is the best defense for life, regardless of what beliefs one possesses.

Despots who rule with an iron glove, and murder their own people in order to control them - do so with zero love in their hearts for others. Where does this hatred come from? Or is it pure evil?

Without a belief in a supreme deity watching them that they must answer to, it absolves them of their responsibility and duty to be accountable to no one else but themselves.

Amyjo wrote: "Without a belief in a supreme deity watching them that they must answer to, it absolves them of their responsibility and duty to be accountable to no one else but themselves."

Absolutely not true, any more than a belief in a deity provides them with justification for their mortal actions.

I don't need to believe in a deity to know right from wrong.

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> This isn't a debate between theism and atheism.
>
> It is simply citing statistical evidence that more
> atheists are responsible for global mass murder
> and "democide" than any combination of religious
> forces in the past century.

No, it's blaming "atheism" for things that had nothing to do with atheism, and everything to do with political power, ego, and dictatorships.

In other words, it's bullshit. Not to mention the outright faults, such as calling Hitler an atheist, when he was no such thing.

> Without a belief in a supreme deity watching them
> that they must answer to, it absolves them of
> their responsibility and duty to be accountable to
> no one else but themselves.

Atheism is a lack of belief in claimed god-things. It's not a belief that one is not responsible to anyone but oneself. So...more bullshit.

Amyjo said:
>>Without a belief in a supreme deity watching them that they must answer to, it absolves them of their responsibility and duty to be accountable to no one else but themselves.

I hope you always stay in some religion since you basically admitted that you can't be trusted unless you have a stick and carrot god to make you behave in the world.

We could not trust you to be moral if you didn't have religion running your life.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 06:39PM by dagny.

Discussing the mindset of mass murderers who are despots and Commies aka Atheists who rule with an iron fist, and you compare me to them?

They absolve themselves of accountability to no one.

No, I'm none of the above, f.y.i.

And just who the hell are you?

Simple fact remains if a despot says there is no God and the only law that matters is his ... your fate depends on whether he's having a good day or a bad day.

If he's a Stalin or worse, it wouldn't matter what you or I believe or do. It all depends on how you fit into a despot's schemes.

This argument is about as credible as deciding whether more mass murderers like chocolate as opposed to those that don't like chocolate.

Killers kill. Why assign the trappings the blame?

Rather than atheism vs theism, the common denominator for mass murder is more likely lack of conscience combined with a selfish maniacal need for power and control. Greed and narcissism are the true fuel.

+1000.
Theists, Atheists, humans commit mass murders regardless.

In the final analysis, atheism has been a consistent thread in politically left ideologies since 1789: sometimes strong and robust, sometimes latent and barely discernible, but always there Even when it shows up in religiously oriented groups, the various manifestations of "liberation theology" such as Sojourners* and Dorothy Day's Catholic Workers movement, the tendency has been to diminish religious practice and piety and tilt towards secularism and combine with politically left governments.

Hitler used religion for political cover (he was deeply into the occult), just as many politicians do, of both the left and the right. (E.g: Joseph Kennedy II freely confesses to being a "cafeteria Catholic;" Trump mis-referencing "Two Corinthians."G.W.Bush, on the other hand, rarely allowed himself being photographed going to church.)


You can take atheism out of Marxist-Leninism.
But you can't take Marxist-Leninism out of atheism.

*A Soros-funded enterprise.

caffiend Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You can take atheism out of Marxist-Leninism.
> But you can't take Marxist-Leninism out of
> atheism.

Since Marxist-Leninism isn't part of atheism, that statement is false on its face.

Trying to justify belief in an imaginary magical man in the sky because "atheists have to be communists" is factually dishonest and logically fallacious. It demonstrates only that those who try to make that argument are dishonest or ignorant, nothing else.

and I guess you can't take the roman catholicism out of communism. just ask the Poles.

Dave, that's a non-sequitor.

Catholicism was a primary resistance element against Communism: it persisted in spite of, not because of, Marxism-Leninism. One can argue that Christianity is usually strengthened by persecution (e.g. China) and adversity (e.g. central Africa), but we should start another thread if we want to discuss that.

Catholicism in general, and the Polish John Paul II in particular, factored in powerfully in toppling the "Second World" hegemony. Poland was the vanguard that brought down the Iron Curtain.

Credit must also go to Reagan (an observant Evangelical), Thatcher (a devout Methodist), and Lech Walensa/Walesa, a very devout Catholic, of Solidarity. Ironic that the movement started in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk!

I hold to my position: atheism is a distinct factor in politically left ideologies since 1789. The more rigid and tyrannical, the more atheist the regime will be. Unless you want to invert that: the more atheist the regime is, the more despotic it will probably be.

the polish communist party was mostly catholic.
even union leader Lech Walesa was catholic.

Mass killings in the 20-21 centuries are not theist or atheist events. The propaganda around this nonsense is so thick, I understand why people persist in this manner, either in apology for their own religiousness or their own atheism; but it's a nonsensical framing from the get-go.

Mass murder is ideologically and politically driven, including so called "terrorism;" but it is verboten on this site to elucidate this fact.

By way of example, then:

https://mobile.twitter.com/cjwerleman/status/815943167916711936

That is not motivated and has absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism.

Human

If we accept op's position that religion, or lack thereof, is responsible for the atrocities committed in the name of a political ideology linked to that religion, then wouldn't Christianity be responsible for the genocides that occurred during Western colonialism?

Yes, thank you for restating your OP. I think most of us picked that up the first time. That's what all the posts are about, showing the fallacies of your professor's argument.

The entire premise is a false dichotomy. To state that since brutal dictators are atheists, atheism is therefore bad is also a logical fallacy. Despots are narcissists and ego-maniacs. They are often highly intelligent and use their pathology to destroy and kill. It has nothing to do with religious or non-religious beliefs. They, in a sense, do create a form of religion about themselves.

I look at our atheist friends and people we know. These are the kindest and most generous folks around.

Erik, AmyJo and I are not arguing a syllogism, "atheism = genocidal tyranny, and therefore such tyranny is caused by atheism." Absolutely not! Mark Twain parodied such a fallacy, "All elephants are quadrupeds; does it follow that all quadrupeds are elephants?"

Our position (if I have AmyJo right) is that the most brutal regimes of the 20th Century were Communist,* and that these regimes officially embraced, advocated, and enforced atheism. Atheism is part and parcel of that ideological package, an integral part of its history since the French Revolution.

It's understandable that the neoAtheists on the board want to disassociate their belief system from such atrocities, just as we Christians are hard-pressed to answer for the religous wars of centuries previous. Those pale by comparison.

Nor do "the kindest and most generous" atheists you know offset the Second World atrocities of the 20th Century. I suggest for your consideration that their moral disposition was framed and formed, perhaps unawares, by the traditions of Western Civilization, of which Christianity is an integral part, even if they repudiate it.

*"Communism" is both vague and irresponsibly pejorative. I prefer the term "Marxist-Leninism." Mao, Stalin, Castro, Lumumba, the Kim dynasty, Breshnev, Mengistu, Pol Pot--Marxist-Leninists, the bunch of them, and every one an avowed atheist.

Yeah, here we go again.

Hitler was not a communist, yet he is the one who unleashed all the destruction in Europe. No one has yet mentioned Japan, where a collective rightist government unleashed similar atrocities in Asia. Those rightists produced slaughter of comparable magnitude to the Marxist-Leninists you describe and yet for some reason they don't figure into the comparison?

Then there is that pesky matter of definitions. Mao's communism was fundamentally different from that of the USSR. That is why Moscow resisted Chinese communism for so long, supporting in the 1910s and 1920s the KMT rather than the CCP. That is why Moscow urged the CCP to accept a truce dividing China in 1946 and was chagrined when the communists conquered the entire country in 1948-9. That is why the alliance between the two countries broke down profoundly in 1956, was moribund by 1960 and was available for exploitation by Nixon in 1968-1972. Both countries considered the other a traitor and accused it of working, with some evidence, in collusion with the Christian world.

You can't simply take the nametags of these various organizations and assume they represent the same thing. When you assume all nominally Marxist-Leninist parties are a single item, all Christian nations are led by fervent theists, and ignore the religious complexity of phenomena like Nazism (the occult element is vastly overwrought) or fascism, you get some cool but illusory contrasts. That may be amusing but it doesn't lead to a better understanding of history.

Thanks Caffiend. I just returned from running errands, and look what I missed in my absence!

You summed it up nicely for me, and your thoughts reflect my own.

As for Communist dictators given to Atheism, because it suits their purposes; I doubt they really care less one way or other whether there's a God over the Universe or not. They are narcissistic despots who only want power concentrated for themselves, and worship of a monotheistic god or other creeds diverts from that purpose.

My ex-husband was born and raised in Communist Poland before the curtain fell. He was being trained by the Russians in counter-intelligence when sent to the United States to receive a college education.

We met in college. He used to tell me that ideologies are only a tool used by our governments to control the masses. That was how he was taught growing up as a Communist in a Communist and an Atheist country. That there is no room for God in such countries, and that God was essentially stamped out during the Cold War, people had to go underground and risk grave persecution to practice their faith sometimes at great cost to them and their families.

There is a false sense of security I believe among some Atheists and likewise believers, who don't see that our own freedom of religion is only a liberty away.

Evil despots who use atheism as a weapon to engage the masses and control them does not mean all atheists are evil or despots. Thank goodness for that.

In short, Communism and Atheism are designed to be deployed by despots to control the masses. Historically, they've been two sides of the same coin, ie, ideology.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 06:02PM by Amyjo.

The analysis is fundamentally flawed. Does it sound more prestigious if we call it "demoflawed?" Yes, that makes what I saw more credible.

Hitler, Mussolini, and other future tyrants and mass murderers assumed power democratically. National Socialism advocated and implemented state control of the economy. Are we really going to call Hitler an anti-democrat on the right? Mussolini was on the left before he moved to the right. He had the support of the vast majority of Italians and won many elections during most of his era. Was he really an anti-democratic rightist?

What some people don't understand is that politics and ideology are often not what drives these people. They will rise to power however they can, including through democratic means, and they will change ideology as necessary to maintain power. You can't ascribe hard and fast labels to these opportunists. That point should be particularly easy to understand given what just happened in the United States.

It is also nonsense to indicate that the opponents of the Godless communists were men of God. They may use the rhetoric of Christian religion to inspire their subjects, but Churchill and FDR were, respectively, a narcissist and a borderline sociopath (Conrad Black) with virtually no real commitment to Christianity. That's one reason they were comfortable using carpet bombing and other techniques that were as immoral as much of what the atheist communists did. Going back further, Abraham Lincoln was an agnostic/atheist. Some of our greatest leaders are men with little or no commitment to Christianity; they achieved what they did in part because they were not tied to an emotional and irrational set of beliefs.

History is a lot messier than this discussion suggests. Nations on both sides were led by agnostic/atheists; leaders on both sides reinvigorated, or created new, religions to suit their purposes. In the big campaigns of 1942 and 1943, Stalin re-emphasized orthodoxy and national tradition in order to motivate commoners to serve his purposes. Movements like nazism and fascism were both leftist and rightist in orientation simultaneously and at different times.

You can't reasonably make black and white lines between these various movements and the various leaders. To do so is a demo-error.

I am convinced that most isms are evil! Anything with an ism on the end should be seriously reconsidered by it's blind adherents (blind leading the blind).

Mormonism
Fascism
Racism
Communism
Atheism
Liberalism
Conservatism
etc
etc..

Forgot a few...but you get the point...


Feminism
Sexism
Catholicism
Academicism
Humanatarianism
Commercialism
Consumerism


All authored and controlled by greed and evil with evil endings (sometimes seemingly wrapped with a pretty bow on top to entice it's followers to their own peril and peril of the human race).

I'm with you in general but have some questions.

First, humanitarianism is "controlled?" It's controlled by "evil" and run by leaders? I am skeptical that there is any organized movement let alone formal leadership. At some point the suffix "ism" becomes almost meaningless. A lot of good is done by humanitarians and I don't see a lot of evil.

I also think a lot of the "isms" you mention are often good and positive. Feminism has done a lot of good as well as some bad. So too, in some times and places, liberalism and conservatism. Those phenomena cannot be dismissed out of hand.

More generally, though, I think you are raising a valid concern. People start in pursuit of goals they feel are important. At some point, in order to pursue those more effectively, they organize. With organization and leadership comes greater power and the possibility of abuse. To that extent what you are saying is that when people organize, the potential for significant evil arises.

I think that is true although it tell us more about people and power, perhaps, than it does about organizations or movements.

Exactly....its a movement that "does good things" that's the pretty bow on top I was talking about that entices its followers (a wolf in sheep's clothing, a pig with lipstick). Sometimes these groups do good or in theory practice good things, but the overall ism is a deceit authored to bring an end of peril to it's adherents and the overall good of mankind. Thanks for clarifying that point.

Hitler








is often, incorrectly, labeled an atheist. He was, in fact, Catholic but I don't have the source at the moment.

Hitler wasn't on the list of the list of Professor Rummel's despots. He would be in the "Christian" group, but I categorize him as a pseudo Christian.

Hitler denounced morality f.y.i. He rejected the Judeo-Christian ethic of what it means to be moral.

So I don't really believe he was really any kind of a Christian at all. If you've read "Mein Kampf," it's a denunciation of morality - he blamed morality on the Jews!

You know, Amyjo, I have trouble with this. What analysis of 20th century atrocities can possibly be credible if it does not include Hitler--or if such a prominent representation of the phenomenon falls in between analytical categories as you imply? Rummel is a non-entity. He could not publish in decent journals or publishing houses because his work was so lame.

And your assertion that Mein Kampf is a denunciation of Jewish-imposed morality is so superficial as to make one wonder if you have actually read that book. Mein Kampf has many points, one of which is that socialism and communism are Jewish plots. So which morality was he denouncing as Jewish: Marxism-Leninism or the Christianity that the Marxist-Leninists sought to overthrow?

I suspect that what is happening here is that you are unintentionally confusing Hitler and Nietzsche, who did indeed blame Christian morality on Jews. Hitler, however, did not.

I've been surprised to discover this myself, recently. But it's all true.

Hitler denounced morality as a Jewish invention.

“The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention, it is a blemish like circumcision.”

- Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 220

“The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.”

- Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler's Table-Talk, p. 7

"Who has said that the Jewish people are the moral conscience of the world?

No, it’s not a great Jewish prophet, or a righteous non-Jew who admired the Jewish people. These words are ascribed to none other than Adolf Hitler, may his name be erased.

In Hitler’s words, “Conscience is a Jewish invention; it is a blemish like circumcision.”

He also said: “If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning, and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it.” (Hitler’s Apocalypse)

To Hitler, having a moral conscience was repugnant and despicable; scruples could deprive an individual from realizing his self-gratifying goals. Unbelievably, Hitler understood, too, that every Jewish soul inherently has such an ethical spirit."

http://www.chabad.org/blogs/blog_cdo/aid/2726745/jewish/Are-the-Jews-Humanitys-Moral-Compass.htm



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 09:11PM by Amyjo.

Amyjo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If you've read "Mein
> Kampf," it's a denunciation of morality - he
> blamed morality on the Jews!

Dear OP, so fair of you to finally mention The Tribe once in this marathon (mostly boring) thread.

And I know that from your cradle you had the chosen-people myth dinned into your head (just like we BOCs got the Chosen-Mormon story in our heads from the time we could talk.

But remember, 92% of the early Bolshevist Commissars were Khazar Jews and they are on record as one of history's big-league killers of Christians (to the tune of sixty millions).

Thanks for the passing mention of that bloody pivotal race.

In reply to your post, elderpopjoy, I was born and raised LDS, and born a Jew.

Aside of that, I didn't start to really learn or absorb my Jewish heritage until the past few years of my life. However, I have always felt Jewish. More Jewish perhaps than I ever was a Mormon.

It's in my psyche, and at the heart of me.

As for a 'mostly boring' thread, if that were so, it wouldn't have almost met the quota # of posts before it will be closed. So if you're so otherwise preoccupied, thanks for stopping by, and sela ve.

It was 6 million Russian Jews who perished in WWII, under Stalin's bloody rule. If you want to compare notes. The point of my OP was that more people have died at the hands of Communist dictators than religious dictators, during the last century.

Those Bolshevist Jews as you describe, were serving Stalin as despotic ruler while carrying out his orders post-Bolshevik Revolution. To murder Christians in Russia was tantamount to murdering God in Russia. Stalin needed to annihilate Christians to annihilate God. The numbers are estimated between 20m to 66m, under Stalin. Stalin IS included in the OP study as one of the dictators responsible for the worst mass murders in recent memory.

" If not exaggerated, Solzhenitsyn asserts that since 1917, the Bolsheviks, continuing under assassin Stalin, through and even after WW2, systematically executed, and inside (and outside) their thousands of Gulags, worked, starved and froze to death, SIXTY-SIX million people, not all, but most of them CHRISTIANS (whom the Bolsheviks hated). This mass death was THE LARGEST REAL "HOLOCAUST" in modern history - but totally unknown today by most Americans, British and western Europeans and absent from our school books. Of course no publisher in the Western world dares reprint Solzhenitsyn's book in English."

http://www.conspiracyworld.com/index0064.htm

The population was far greater in the 20th century, the technology to commit mass murder was much more advanced in the 20th century. Trust me, if the Christians of the Crusades had the tool to murder that were available in the 20th century, things would look much different.

An oh yes, while the Christian atrocities were done in the name of God, the atrocities committed by atheists were committed by atheists, not in the name of atheism.

Now, if we are trying to say that the crimes of individual atheists condemn all of atheism, then the crimes of each christian condemns all Christianity.

Germany was no atheist, they had slogans to god on the solders uniforms, Stalin reintroduced religion in order to fight the 2nd world war.

There are so many fallacies in the OP, it was hard to find where to start.

God still doesn't exist. You want me to believe in a false God because you think it will decrease the chances of me becoming a murderous dictator?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2017 09:16PM by Heretic 2.

Democide

::giggle::