I've seen the likes of Vhehn say that Religion is very dangerous. So even though I know he is full of it, i thought i would do some research and see how dangerous it was. First bit of research...My bible! Lets see how many people will killed in the name of God and by God himself. The numbers were staggering! 2,391,421 There were some parts where the numbers were not shown, but doing a best "guess-tamate, i would put the number at around 3-4 million total. That number happened over several thousand years though. So there you have it...people getting killed in the bible...but lets move on. Where else were people getting killed by Christians after the bible was written...well lets look at the top 3. Crusades, spanish inquisition and burning the witches. Scholars estimate that the Crusades of the middle ages cost from 58,000 to 133,000 lives. The most realistic figure for the Spanish Inquisition puts the total killed from 1480 to 1808 at up to 31,912. Finally, records indicate that the number of witches killed may be over 30,000. Some argue that records don't tell everything and suggest that maybe even 100,000 were killed. These three events, totaling over 264,000 killed, are thought to be the largest atrocities perpetrated by one or another form of Christendom. But lets look how bad its been in the last 100 years. And lets throw ALL religions into the mix...Judism, Christianity, Islam and all those other little religions that nobody ever notices like vodoo, hutus, tutsis, ect I came up with the figure of 28 million! WOW! Thats alot! Some shocking i didnt even know about like 1.5 million being killed in pakistan, armenian genocide, ect. But now the worst of it...(Vhehn you better stop reading cause you aint going to like it) Atheistic communism. By far the biggest killer in the last 100 years with total killed of 110 million. But wait...thats not all. If you add countries that discouraged any sort of religion like nazi germany, or nationalist China, the number goes up to 141,600,000. Conclusion... Religious deaths 28 million Atheism deaths 141 million (winner!) So I conclude that its not religion or atheism that is dangerous. Man is dangerous. But from the results we can see that religion definately stops man from killing more than he does without religion. So its safe to assume that an atheist is about 5 times more likely to kill you over his beliefs than a religious person. *most of the research i got was from Rudolph Joseph Rummel a professor of political science at the Univercity of hawaii who wrote Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocides and Mass Murders 1917-1987 (1990); China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991); Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (1992); Death by Government (1994); and Statistics of Democide (1997)
Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible's God. Raised as Catholic he went to a monastery school and, interestingly, walked everyday past a stone arch which was carved the monastery's coat of arms which included a swastika. As a young boy, Hitler's most ardent goal was to become a priest. Much of his philosophy came from the Bible, and more influentially, from the Christian Social movement.
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach. -Adolf Hitler Hitler often claimed he was doing the work of the almighty creator. How else could he get people to back him? Hitlers views were darwinistic. Without Darwinism, especially in its social Darwinist and eugenics permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the world's greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.
Fanaticism is dangerous. You know, people who want their point of view to prevail SO badly that they can call the assassination of the American president "lucky".
how many people were on earth when your god murdered all but 8 with a flood? religion is not dangerous for everyone. for some it is very useful: "Religion is regarded by the common man as true, the wise man as false, and the rulers as useful." ~Seneca