Really? Religion of Peace.

So, you think the Ku Klux Klan
and the Spanish Inquisition are bad?
So do we, but...
Put the Numbers in Perspective


More people are killed by Islamists each year than in all 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition combined. (source)

Islamic terrorists murder more people every day than the Ku Klux Klan has in the last 50 years. (source)

More civilians were killed by Muslim extremists in two hours on September 11th than in the 36 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. (source)
19 Muslim hijackers killed more innocents in two hours on September 11th than the number of American criminals executed in the last 65 years. (source)

 

Atheist Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of a few million people in just four years.....

 

Since you appear to believe atheism causes homocidal insanity, could you explain how it works? Given you hold this position we must assume you've thought it through. What is it about atheism that causes such a thing?

 

8,000,000 were killed during the 30 Years War.

Oh, sorry, were you just arbitrarily picking small skirmishes to make Islam look worse? My bad.

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Oh, was he killing them in the name of his atheism? Did Pol Pot pray to nothing everyday for the deaths of those people?

 

Do you think religion causes the same? If you listen to some atheists they seem to think so.

 

The Spanish Inquisition wasn't as bad as many people think. Only a few thousand over a 400 year period. The website you posted seems a little biased in my opinion.

 

No, I think mental dysfunction is responsible. Combined with a culture of cheap life and fear of authority, plus a disenfranchised people - and you have a recipe for mayhem. This might wear the cloak of religion, or atheism, or neither, but the core problem is nothing to do with cloaks.

 

The death toll of European colonialism can be estimated to be as high as 100 million people. However, this is a quite vivid estimation, including diseases and so on from many different nations under many years. For those like doombug who enjoy understanding a misrepresentation of arguments like this, I can point out that this isn't an argument that Europeans are bad, but that clearly, pulling death toll numbers is not a reliable way to judge a group of people.

European colonialism is often divided into subsets, based on perceived motives, nationalities and so on, but if we judged European colonialism in the same way as we do with Islamic violence, we should not. A big part of accusations of racism in these kind of debates is the argument that people who don't identify as well with another ethnic group tend to bunch them together, even though the Ottoman Empire and Iran are as different as Spain is to Russia. We also tend to downplay the actual motives behind attacks and attribute it all to religion, whereas we have a better understanding of the finer details about colonialism, even though to the common people, colonialism was often based around converting people, while the Muslim conquest often was characterised by economic persuasion and better treatment of religious minorities.

I'm not up to date with the numbers of deaths from Islamic terror attacks and deaths from American/European invasion of the Middle East since 9/11, but it begs the question of whether attacks become less bad if they enjoy legal support from nations. It is not surprising at all that many people in the middle east get the idea that the entire Christian world is conspiring to wipe them out, just as many westerners get the same idea about Islam.

I conclude with a quote from the website in the OP
"What opinions should I form about my Muslim neighbor, co-worker or friend from your site? Absolutely none. Judge a person only by his or her own words and deeds - and nothing else. (Actually, this isn't a question that we've ever been asked, but we did want to reinforce the point that every Muslim is an individual and shouldn't be thought of differently merely because of their religious affiliation)."

 

I agree with you on that one. Religion nor atheism has to do with it. The crusades, Salem witch trials, Stalin, Polpot, etc....has a common thread which is the dark side of human nature. This is something mankind has dealt with and will deal with in the future. It has to do with mankind....not ideology, beliefs or non-beliefs.

 

And the Mongols killed over one million people in 24 hours in the city of Merv. Mongols at the time were considered religious folk,, Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism were their prime religions.

Many Khmer Rouge solder's remains were found with an effigy of Buddha in their mouths meaning they still practiced Theravada Buddhism. Pathet Lao combatants much the same.

Btw,, your point being?

 

My point being that atheism can be blamed for many deaths if you use the same logic that says religion is to blame as well. Truth is since religious and non-religious people have committed such acts the logic doesn't work. Being religious or not has nothing to do with it.

 

Then why did you bring up Pol Pot and not what the Catholics did to the Cathars in southern France?

 

Because as I explained these things have nothing to do with those acts. Why do atheists bring up the crusades yet ignore Stalin? Hypocrisy....and I have just successfully pointed that out.

 

D'oh,,,because the crusades were religious wars. Deaths in USSR and China had nothing to do with religion, more to do with struggle for power and poorly executed economic policies.

 

Not at all. Religion was just used as an excuse.

 

You leave out that Almighty God the Saviour deals with the naughty by torturing them forever.
Nothing a human could do to another remotely approaches that.

If hideous torture is good enough for god, and is used both as punishment and prevention, how
could it be wrong for the pious to torture the impious? It might even save them from worse later on.

 

That's the difference. Religion can be used to justify basically any action. Can you explain the logic for how atheism can be used in the same way?

 

Do try to educate yourself when you attempt to correct me. Islam murdered about 270 million people during its 1400+ years . 270 million total is not a small skirmish in case you think it is. And that is the low estimate . The link I am giving breaks it down fairly well but other sources quote the murdered victims as being far more. I give the low estimate so as to not offend your fine sensitivities.

 

Yes, a great many say that when confronted with the truth.

 

According to Bill Warner. Yeah, I know, I've heard that number touted around before. No, it isn't a "low estimate", and in fact, it is the highest estimate I have ever seen. How about we get an estimate from somebody who is actually a historian? I don't usually trust mathematicians to be experts in history.

For an example of his "great" historical work, part of the 270 million number comes from Bill Warner quoting Koenraad Elst's "Negationism in India." Elst declares that 80 million were killed "by Islam" due to the fact that over a period of 525 years, population declined by that amount. No, of course there could have been no famines, natural declines, or diseases... must have been Islam!

 

1400 Years of Islam, Over 270 Million Dead


These figures are a rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad.

Africa

Thomas Sowell [Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, BasicBooks, 1994, p. 188] estimates that 11 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic and 14 million were sent to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. For every slave captured many others died. Estimates of this collateral damage vary. The renowned missionary David Livingstone estimated that for every slave who reached a plantation, five others were killed in the initial raid or died of illness and privation on the forced march.[Woman?s Presbyterian Board of Missions, David Livingstone, p. 62, 1888] Those who were left behind were the very young, the weak, the sick and the old. These soon died since the main providers had been killed or enslaved. So, for 25 million slaves delivered to the market, we have an estimated death of about 120 million people. Islam ran the wholesale slave trade in Africa.

120 million Africans

Christians

The number of Christians martyred by Islam is 9 million [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-10] . A rough estimate by Raphael Moore in History of Asia Minor is that another 50 million died in wars by jihad. So counting the million African Christians killed in the 20th century we have:

60 million Christians

Hindus

Koenard Elst in Negationism in India gives an estimate of 80 million Hindus killed in the total jihad against India. [Koenard Elst, Negationism in India, Voice of India, New Delhi, 2002, pg. 34.] The country of India today is only half the size of ancient India, due to jihad. The mountains near India are called the Hindu Kush, meaning the ?funeral pyre of the Hindus.?

80 million Hindus

Buddhists

Buddhists do not keep up with the history of war. Keep in mind that in jihad only Christians and Jews were allowed to survive as dhimmis (servants to Islam); everyone else had to convert or die. Jihad killed the Buddhists in Turkey, Afghanistan, along the Silk Route, and in India. The total is roughly 10 million. [David B. Barrett, Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends AD 30-AD 2200, William Carey Library, 2001, p. 230, table 4-1.]

10 million Buddhists

Jews

Oddly enough there were not enough Jews killed in jihad to significantly affect the totals of the Great Annihilation. The jihad in Arabia was 100 percent effective, but the numbers were in the thousands, not millions. After that, the Jews submitted and became the dhimmis (servants and second class citizens) of Islam and did not have geographic political power.

This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.

 

Not sure what this has to do with Islam or Jihad. Everybody during the Middle Ages and until the 18th and 19th century had slaves, including Christians. Were Christian slavers also "jihadists"? And the bit about "Islam" having a wholesale monopoly on the slave trade in Africa is just a flat out lie. Is Bill Warner pretending that Western civilization never had a slave trade?

Even if we were to take the 25 million at face value, you can't multiply that number by a shaky estimate and pretend that you have a solid total number of dead.

What Raphael Moore actually said: "Between the tolls exacted from prisons, concentration camps, forced marches and exiles, warfare, famine, and brutal military occupation, it is reasonable to conclude that up to 50 million Orthodox Christians have perished in the first eight decades of the twentieth century." http://www.serfes.org/orthodox/memoryof.htm

I don't see any mention of Islam or jihad here, do you? In fact, Moore attributes only 3.65 million deaths to the Ottoman Empire. So, there goes 46.35 million right off the bat.

Already addressed this.

The reference that he cites doesn't say what he claims it says. In fact, the reference that he uses only cites Christian martyrs dying by the hands of Buddhists.

Not even worth addressing since it doesn't knock up the number at all.

 

In order to win an argument against someone who would die for you (presumably, as a fellow American); you're willing to justify the actions of those who would kill you. Characterized by economic persuasion and better treatment of religious minorities. Astonishing. You must be either delirious or suicidal.

 

Some people prefer to look at complex issues in complex ways. It is too easy to paint the world in black and white, and that my friend, is necessarily a good thing.

 

What makes you think I'm American? My location and nationality is clearly indicated in the top right corner of my every post, my username is an, albeit lame, pun on my nationality, I have never even been to America.

I justify no actions aimed against me or anyone else (although I will justify a good action or idea regardless of its source, but that's another topic), I even wrote explicitly that my argument completely revolves around the idea of judging people as a group instead of individually. My post above is not written or meant as justification for the crimes, it is meant to put other crimes into perspective. It wouldn't surprise me if there were muslims who would kill me, but I know there are many muslims who would not.

At the same time, I believe in a thing called justice, a primary tenant of which is that no retribution should reach a person based on the crime/similar of another. Any muslim who would not kill me should walk free of the burden of my judgement, just as any Christian should walk free without my judgement for any Crusades, and any man should walk free from judgement for any atrocity committed by a man. While the site in the OP and similar don't explicitly contain calls for these generalisations, it is not hard to see how divisive it is. Imagine being a middle eastern man, hearing the equivalent stories about Christian troops.

As for your comments regarding the muslim expansion, yes, the Muslims demanded lower taxes and displayed more religious tolerance than the Byzantine Empire which controlled most of the area. Even Christian minorities such as the Copts enjoyed greater tolerance under the Muslims than under the Christian Byzantine Empire. Some say the muslims displayed the first recorded instances of population-wide religious tolerance in history, but I'm sure that depends on your definitions.