Beware the decline of Christianity

[Skyweir]

You are freakishly thorough Wosa. Astute in all things ... your faith in god, religious institution is gobsmacking to me

What is it that makes you tick Makes you, you .. how do you remain absorbed in your religiosity.

[Avatar]

Cool, thanks guys. Will definitely check it out.

--A

[Skyweir]

So I read the paper you linked .. and it was interesting .. cant say I really got it all but its a start

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Judging 1,000,000,000+ people sweepingly, is not a very scientifically, psychologically sound thing to do. Whether those 10^9+ people believe in the three-in-one version of the being that the others think of as just one-in-one, or not.

Bunk. Christianity doesn't stone people, throw them off buildings, or behead them.

Oh really, now? Are we talking as of late or for all recorded Christian history? I seem to recall Yugoslavia going through several recent phases of Christian-on-Christian atrocity-violence, or Christian-on-Muslim ethnic cleansing (of a greater scope than the reverse). But maybe 20-30 years isn't recent enough. Yet then how do we know that in 20-30 years, most Muslim nations won't have calmed down?

Besides, people need to do their research better. In the entire record of democide that we have, Christian-run nations have killed an insanely larger number of people than Muslim-run ones have. We're talking tens upon tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions of people. Even factoring in what Muslim armies have done in India, the death toll is still way under that for the toll of Christian armies and related regimes.

I mean take Iran. OK, supposedly an example of "totalitarian" Islam. How many people have been executed there? IDK, how about several times less than the number of people executed in little ol' South Korea by the US-installed regime back in the day, or Guatemala from the 1950s onward, etc.

[Skyweir]

Brilliantly informative post Mig. Great to see you here and posting.

[SoulBiter]

Judging 1,000,000,000+ people sweepingly, is not a very scientifically, psychologically sound thing to do. Whether those 10^9+ people believe in the three-in-one version of the being that the others think of as just one-in-one, or not.

Bunk. Christianity doesn't stone people, throw them off buildings, or behead them.

Oh really, now? Are we talking as of late or for all recorded Christian history? I seem to recall Yugoslavia going through several recent phases of Christian-on-Christian atrocity-violence, or Christian-on-Muslim ethnic cleansing (of a greater scope than the reverse). But maybe 20-30 years isn't recent enough. Yet then how do we know that in 20-30 years, most Muslim nations won't have calmed down?

Besides, people need to do their research better. In the entire record of democide that we have, Christian-run nations have killed an insanely larger number of people than Muslim-run ones have. We're talking tens upon tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions of people. Even factoring in what Muslim armies have done in India, the death toll is still way under that for the toll of Christian armies and related regimes.

I mean take Iran. OK, supposedly an example of "totalitarian" Islam. How many people have been executed there? IDK, how about several times less than the number of people executed in little ol' South Korea by the US-installed regime back in the day, or Guatemala from the 1950s onward, etc.

The difference is that the Muslim run nations have been doing so in the name of Allah and on the supposed direction of the Prophet Mohammad. Whereas in the modern world Christian nations have killed based on wars that were not based on secular reasons not religious ones.

If you go back and look at history of peoples killed in the name of religion specifically, you may well find that your numbers are changed considerably.

[Rawedge Rim]

Judging 1,000,000,000+ people sweepingly, is not a very scientifically, psychologically sound thing to do. Whether those 10^9+ people believe in the three-in-one version of the being that the others think of as just one-in-one, or not.

Bunk. Christianity doesn't stone people, throw them off buildings, or behead them.

Oh really, now? Are we talking as of late or for all recorded Christian history? I seem to recall Yugoslavia going through several recent phases of Christian-on-Christian atrocity-violence, or Christian-on-Muslim ethnic cleansing (of a greater scope than the reverse). But maybe 20-30 years isn't recent enough. Yet then how do we know that in 20-30 years, most Muslim nations won't have calmed down?

Besides, people need to do their research better. In the entire record of democide that we have, Christian-run nations have killed an insanely larger number of people than Muslim-run ones have. We're talking tens upon tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions of people. Even factoring in what Muslim armies have done in India, the death toll is still way under that for the toll of Christian armies and related regimes.

I mean take Iran. OK, supposedly an example of "totalitarian" Islam. How many people have been executed there? IDK, how about several times less than the number of people executed in little ol' South Korea by the US-installed regime back in the day, or Guatemala from the 1950s onward, etc.

while the actions are the same, the underlying reason differs significantly in the following examples:

someone who is nominally of the Christian faith robs a bank, because that is where the money is.....

someone who is devoutly Muslim robs a bank, because somewhere it said that the faithful should rob a bank for the greater glory of Allah.

Same with SB's statement. A number of government have gone to war with other nations, who are nominally at least Christian, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion (land aquistion, resources, honor, etc).

This is different from a government going to war in the name of God.

[Skyweir]

Ooh careful RR there are the Crusades, the historical religious cleansing campaigns, as well as that which Mig refers ... re which the formerly united Yugoslavia suffered in the modern age.

Look at Lebanon, they have a history of Christian on Muslim violence.

Im just saying its not the religion of peace and love it claims .. it generally comes wielding the sword.

[SoulBiter]

Ooh careful RR there are the Crusades, the historical religious cleansing campaigns, as well as that which Mig refers ... re which the formerly united Yugoslavia suffered in the modern age.

Look at Lebanon, they have a history of Christian on Muslim violence.

Im just saying its not the religion of peace and love it claims .. it generally comes wielding the sword.

All of which combined come no where close to the muslim expansions that pre dated the crusades.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

If a person is really a Christian, then they do things in the name of Christ. They might not admit to doing so, but they will find a rationalization to that effect. For example, the imperial-colonial mega-killing (Native Americans, slavery, forced labor in Africa, probably the famines in India) were correlated with religious arguments on behalf of racism, religious arguments grounded in the Bible and Biblical analysis.

All of which combined come no where close to the muslim expansions that pre dated the crusades.

How so? If you tally up the Inquisitions, the Thirty Years' War, the Albigensian crusade, the Middle Eastern crusades, the witch-hunts, 20th Century Yugoslavia, the Paulician repression (long ago), the destruction of Baghdad in the 1200s (and the slaughter of others in the region overall at the time), etc. and so forth and so on, you get a pretty hefty death toll. These were all more or less directly grounded in a "defense [or offense, as it were] of the faith."

While I disagree with much of the following essay, it does have the merit of being shot through with decent analysis and citations: https://www.scribd.com/doc/122890407/Es ... A-Plaisted

And according to that essay, the Middle Eastern crusades alone may have involved the deaths of up to 20,000,000 people. Not likely and way higher than all other figures I know of (5,000,000 is the other highest figure I remember), but worth considering.

[SoulBiter]

If a person is really a Christian, then they do things in the name of Christ. They might not admit to doing so, but they will find a rationalization to that effect.

I disagree. Was the US involvement in WW1 or WW2 because Jesus told the US leaders to go to war? Were those on the front lines fighting, doing so because they were looking to be martyr'd for Jesus? I believe you are conflating two separate things. You are linking deaths/killing for secular reasons with those that are based on religious reasons.

And according to that essay, the Middle Eastern crusades alone may have involved the deaths of up to 20,000,000 people. Not likely and way higher than all other figures I know of (5,000,000 is the other highest figure I remember), but worth considering.

It is estimated that 270 million people have been killed by Jihad for Islam.

[Rawedge Rim]

If a person is really a Christian, then they do things in the name of Christ. They might not admit to doing so, but they will find a rationalization to that effect. For example, the imperial-colonial mega-killing (Native Americans, slavery, forced labor in Africa, probably the famines in India) were correlated with religious arguments on behalf of racism, religious arguments grounded in the Bible and Biblical analysis.

All of which combined come no where close to the muslim expansions that pre dated the crusades.

How so? If you tally up the Inquisitions, the Thirty Years' War, the Albigensian crusade, the Middle Eastern crusades, the witch-hunts, 20th Century Yugoslavia, the Paulician repression (long ago), the destruction of Baghdad in the 1200s (and the slaughter of others in the region overall at the time), etc. and so forth and so on, you get a pretty hefty death toll. These were all more or less directly grounded in a "defense [or offense, as it were] of the faith."

While I disagree with much of the following essay, it does have the merit of being shot through with decent analysis and citations: https://www.scribd.com/doc/122890407/Es ... A-Plaisted

And according to that essay, the Middle Eastern crusades alone may have involved the deaths of up to 20,000,000 people. Not likely and way higher than all other figures I know of (5,000,000 is the other highest figure I remember), but worth considering.

The Inquisition, as I've covered before, if I remember correctly, claimed about 3000 lives in several hundred years (attributed directly to the Church, not those claiming to be acting in the name of the Church, such as the later Crusades, which were about land for nobles, and had little to do with reclaiming the Holy Land for Christendom)

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

270 million people have been killed by Jihad for Islam.

OK, so when you make claims like this, you really ought to cite your sources. I have been studying the statistics of democide for 17 years and no number of that magnitude has been even hinted at in the thousands of sources that I and other researchers have sifted through.

The Inquisition, as I've covered before, if I remember correctly, claimed about 3000 lives in several hundred years (attributed directly to the Church, not those claiming to be acting in the name of the Church, such as the later Crusades, which were about land for nobles, and had little to do with reclaiming the Holy Land for Christendom)

The figure of 3,000 for the Inquisition is a revised number based on one strain of analysis. And your remarks about the Crusades are flat-out false. The Albigensian Crusade was specifically organized to wipe out Gnostic heretics in France and the range of figures that reputable historians have cited in this case go from about 100,000 to possibly 1,000,000. (Matthew White and R. J. Rummel are good [NOT PERFECT] sources for a broad, detailed perspective on these questions.)

EDIT:

I'm going to refer to a list I wrote out in another post:

I hesitate to make an assertion like, "Christianity has killed X people over the ages." But let's grant that an assertion like this, perhaps parsed more specifically as, "Nations ruled by Christians have killed X people over the ages," is true, maybe with a qualifier like "and their beliefs were highly relevant to the killing." How many people = X?

The number is actually, surprisingly even to me, very high. Like, way higher than for anything we might be normally tempted to fill in for "Nations ruled by _____," like "Islam" or "Communism," say.

To start our list, I'll give you an obscure example. The government of China before Mao's, the KMT, was terribly murderous towards its people. Not nearly so much so as Mao's was, but they did, after all, kill more people in a single act, than any other government ever did in the entire known history of the world: they deliberately caused the Yellow River to flood in 1938, wiping out as many as about 900,000 of their own people in one decision and decisive event. Overall, when the kinds of slavery they imposed and the starvation they brought about, and the executions and massacres they perpetrated, are factored in, the balance of the statistics favors an order of magnitude of about 10,000,000 for KMT democide.

What hath Nanjing to do with Jerusalem? Well, the leader of the KMT was a Christian, that's what.

This wasn't the first time, or even the most acute time, honestly, that a Christian leader in China oversaw a lot of death. The Taiping Rebellion, which killed maybe ten million to forty million people, was caused by a Christian movement that arose in the region. IIRC the only information we have that would let us guess at the responsibility of the Christian rebels for that death toll, comes from a comparison of the statistics for the capture of the capital: the rebels killed 25,000 residents, the government killed 100,000, so let's say at most the Taiping rebels killed 10,000,000 people, somehow or other, over that time period. But really, most of those who died did so as a side-effect of the war, from deprivation attending the desolation of the landscape, so depending on how much or how so the rebels contributed to that factor, they might have had more blame to bear for the population loss as such.

So far, so what? Why am I not bringing up more obvious culprits, like the Inquisitions or the witch-hunts or the (Middle Eastern and Albigensian) Crusades? I could also refer to tsarist Russia's Circassian genocide in the 1800s, or the "infinite number" of miscellaneous heretics that Robert Bellarmine claimed had been exterminated by his day, or the Ustashe holocaust in WW2 Yugoslavia, and so on and on. Such assorted interludes add up to many, many millions of people. Throw in the 30 Years' War, and what the Khanate forces did to Muslims (outside the context of the European Crusades) in relation to their leaders Mongke and Hulagu, and you get a part of the X of the dead, comparable to the figures just outlined for China.

But that's not even the half of it. Let's start firing the big guns by referring to the Native Americans. Sure, a lot of the dying here was caused by diseases that were unintentionally introduced. But the invaders hardly did anything to help the natives resist the diseases, enslaving and starving so many that many more perished for that reason on top of whatever alien sickness had come to afflict them. When the Mongolian armies invaded China earlier, there was a similar pattern of atrocities + famine + plague, and the population collapse is estimated at 30,000,000 to 60,000,000, with one fairly random source claiming that about 18,500,000 of this was due to outright killing (I am unaware how this number was arrived at; it comes from a relatively credible set of historians but I stress the "relatively," here). So if anywhere from 20,000,000 to 100,000,000 Native Americans died due to the European invasion, then for all we know, anywhere from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 of this might have been due to causes for which the invaders were entirely culpable. David Stannard quotes one priest (IIRC) aware of the matter at the time, who said something about the attendant plagues being fortuitous for his and his associates' cause, as it helped with the depletion of the native population overall; so I wonder whether we ought to excuse the invaders at all, for the vast morbidity of those times and places?

If you're skeptical of capitalism, or even if you're sympathetic to things like communism, you might be tempted to blame capitalism in some relevant sense for British India's string of enormous famines. But under the circumstances (especially given e.g. Max Weber's analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, say) you could just as well say that it was Britain as a Christian country that killed who knows how many millions, if not tens of millions, of Indians, that way.

And then there's Africa. And not just, or even mostly, the European slave trade. That is believed, on what evidence I know not, to have resulted in anywhere from a few million, to maybe 60,000,000 (I'll confess, not a very plausible number), deaths. But this was only a prelude to things like the Congo Free State, or (most of) France's holocausts in its African colonies (the Algerian democide began earlier than the land grab of the late 1800s), or Portugal's, or whoever's. Again, we're talking somewhere on the order of magnitude of 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 dead---or maybe even more (since it's possible that about 20,000,000 died in just the Congo Free State alone).

I could go on, honestly: pogroms against Jews here or there, things America has done (plenty), Yugoslavia again (in the 1990s; think of that one massacre in which 8,000 people died, for which the government of Belgium, IIRC, later resigned!); I'm probably forgetting quite a few case studies. Suffice it to say, it appears entirely possible that Christian nations have killed something like 100,000,000 people over the ages, maybe even around 200,000,000. Oftentimes in episodes that took place in eras when the Earth's population was far smaller than it is now.

Now, the title of this thread is "A weird argument for Christianity," because you know, why on Earth did a religion started by a man like Jesus Christ lead to this? You'd hope that if the rhetoric of the Holy Spirit indwelling us were true, then even if Christians weren't perfect, there wouldn't be such an eerie correlation between the history of atrocity, and the history of Christianity, or whatever. Yet there it is.

So, as a Christian, I think this is why: when we do metaphysics, we often end up thinking of substances and their properties, which are the objects that correspond to how in language we have subjects and their predicates. Evil is the opposite of good, is its active negation: evil is either corruption or destruction, the negation of good properties or the negation of good substantial objects. The demons (to talk "in-universe" re: the Christian narrative) would be hungry to corrupt Christians into destroying more life than any others would, I suspect. The fact that it is Christianity that is so correlated with the demons' expression in history, is symptomatic of the fact that the Christian movement is supposed to be the best exemplar of God's grace and power. If the Church were not triumphant in itself, the demons would not want to possess so many of its militant followers.

QED...

[Skyweir]

Wow great rebuttal Mig

Nice couple of posts rather. What is your field Mig?

[SoulBiter]

270 million people have been killed by Jihad for Islam.

OK, so when you make claims like this, you really ought to cite your sources. I have been studying the statistics of democide for 17 years and no number of that magnitude has been even hinted at in the thousands of sources that I and other researchers have sifted through.

The Inquisition, as I've covered before, if I remember correctly, claimed about 3000 lives in several hundred years (attributed directly to the Church, not those claiming to be acting in the name of the Church, such as the later Crusades, which were about land for nobles, and had little to do with reclaiming the Holy Land for Christendom)

The figure of 3,000 for the Inquisition is a revised number based on one strain of analysis. And your remarks about the Crusades are flat-out false. The Albigensian Crusade was specifically organized to wipe out Gnostic heretics in France and the range of figures that reputable historians have cited in this case go from about 100,000 to possibly 1,000,000. (Matthew White and R. J. Rummel are good [NOT PERFECT] sources for a broad, detailed perspective on these questions.)

EDIT:

I'm going to refer to a list I wrote out in another post:

I hesitate to make an assertion like, "Christianity has killed X people over the ages." But let's grant that an assertion like this, perhaps parsed more specifically as, "Nations ruled by Christians have killed X people over the ages," is true, maybe with a qualifier like "and their beliefs were highly relevant to the killing." How many people = X?

The number is actually, surprisingly even to me, very high. Like, way higher than for anything we might be normally tempted to fill in for "Nations ruled by _____," like "Islam" or "Communism," say.

To start our list, I'll give you an obscure example. The government of China before Mao's, the KMT, was terribly murderous towards its people. Not nearly so much so as Mao's was, but they did, after all, kill more people in a single act, than any other government ever did in the entire known history of the world: they deliberately caused the Yellow River to flood in 1938, wiping out as many as about 900,000 of their own people in one decision and decisive event. Overall, when the kinds of slavery they imposed and the starvation they brought about, and the executions and massacres they perpetrated, are factored in, the balance of the statistics favors an order of magnitude of about 10,000,000 for KMT democide.

What hath Nanjing to do with Jerusalem? Well, the leader of the KMT was a Christian, that's what.

This wasn't the first time, or even the most acute time, honestly, that a Christian leader in China oversaw a lot of death. The Taiping Rebellion, which killed maybe ten million to forty million people, was caused by a Christian movement that arose in the region. IIRC the only information we have that would let us guess at the responsibility of the Christian rebels for that death toll, comes from a comparison of the statistics for the capture of the capital: the rebels killed 25,000 residents, the government killed 100,000, so let's say at most the Taiping rebels killed 10,000,000 people, somehow or other, over that time period. But really, most of those who died did so as a side-effect of the war, from deprivation attending the desolation of the landscape, so depending on how much or how so the rebels contributed to that factor, they might have had more blame to bear for the population loss as such.

So far, so what? Why am I not bringing up more obvious culprits, like the Inquisitions or the witch-hunts or the (Middle Eastern and Albigensian) Crusades? I could also refer to tsarist Russia's Circassian genocide in the 1800s, or the "infinite number" of miscellaneous heretics that Robert Bellarmine claimed had been exterminated by his day, or the Ustashe holocaust in WW2 Yugoslavia, and so on and on. Such assorted interludes add up to many, many millions of people. Throw in the 30 Years' War, and what the Khanate forces did to Muslims (outside the context of the European Crusades) in relation to their leaders Mongke and Hulagu, and you get a part of the X of the dead, comparable to the figures just outlined for China.

But that's not even the half of it. Let's start firing the big guns by referring to the Native Americans. Sure, a lot of the dying here was caused by diseases that were unintentionally introduced. But the invaders hardly did anything to help the natives resist the diseases, enslaving and starving so many that many more perished for that reason on top of whatever alien sickness had come to afflict them. When the Mongolian armies invaded China earlier, there was a similar pattern of atrocities + famine + plague, and the population collapse is estimated at 30,000,000 to 60,000,000, with one fairly random source claiming that about 18,500,000 of this was due to outright killing (I am unaware how this number was arrived at; it comes from a relatively credible set of historians but I stress the "relatively," here). So if anywhere from 20,000,000 to 100,000,000 Native Americans died due to the European invasion, then for all we know, anywhere from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 of this might have been due to causes for which the invaders were entirely culpable. David Stannard quotes one priest (IIRC) aware of the matter at the time, who said something about the attendant plagues being fortuitous for his and his associates' cause, as it helped with the depletion of the native population overall; so I wonder whether we ought to excuse the invaders at all, for the vast morbidity of those times and places?

If you're skeptical of capitalism, or even if you're sympathetic to things like communism, you might be tempted to blame capitalism in some relevant sense for British India's string of enormous famines. But under the circumstances (especially given e.g. Max Weber's analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, say) you could just as well say that it was Britain as a Christian country that killed who knows how many millions, if not tens of millions, of Indians, that way.

And then there's Africa. And not just, or even mostly, the European slave trade. That is believed, on what evidence I know not, to have resulted in anywhere from a few million, to maybe 60,000,000 (I'll confess, not a very plausible number), deaths. But this was only a prelude to things like the Congo Free State, or (most of) France's holocausts in its African colonies (the Algerian democide began earlier than the land grab of the late 1800s), or Portugal's, or whoever's. Again, we're talking somewhere on the order of magnitude of 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 dead---or maybe even more (since it's possible that about 20,000,000 died in just the Congo Free State alone).

I could go on, honestly: pogroms against Jews here or there, things America has done (plenty), Yugoslavia again (in the 1990s; think of that one massacre in which 8,000 people died, for which the government of Belgium, IIRC, later resigned!); I'm probably forgetting quite a few case studies. Suffice it to say, it appears entirely possible that Christian nations have killed something like 100,000,000 people over the ages, maybe even around 200,000,000. Oftentimes in episodes that took place in eras when the Earth's population was far smaller than it is now.

Now, the title of this thread is "A weird argument for Christianity," because you know, why on Earth did a religion started by a man like Jesus Christ lead to this? You'd hope that if the rhetoric of the Holy Spirit indwelling us were true, then even if Christians weren't perfect, there wouldn't be such an eerie correlation between the history of atrocity, and the history of Christianity, or whatever. Yet there it is.

So, as a Christian, I think this is why: when we do metaphysics, we often end up thinking of substances and their properties, which are the objects that correspond to how in language we have subjects and their predicates. Evil is the opposite of good, is its active negation: evil is either corruption or destruction, the negation of good properties or the negation of good substantial objects. The demons (to talk "in-universe" re: the Christian narrative) would be hungry to corrupt Christians into destroying more life than any others would, I suspect. The fact that it is Christianity that is so correlated with the demons' expression in history, is symptomatic of the fact that the Christian movement is supposed to be the best exemplar of God's grace and power. If the Church were not triumphant in itself, the demons would not want to possess so many of its militant followers.

QED...

I dont kmow why I should, you haven't sited a single source except your opinion so far.

I grant that you spent alot of time putting this together but to not site your sources while at the same time asking someone else to site theirs is a bit hypocritical.


Btw- this might make a good tank topic. I will be out of town for work this week so it maybe be a while before I can get back to it.

[Rawedge Rim]

270 million people have been killed by Jihad for Islam.

OK, so when you make claims like this, you really ought to cite your sources. I have been studying the statistics of democide for 17 years and no number of that magnitude has been even hinted at in the thousands of sources that I and other researchers have sifted through.

The Inquisition, as I've covered before, if I remember correctly, claimed about 3000 lives in several hundred years (attributed directly to the Church, not those claiming to be acting in the name of the Church, such as the later Crusades, which were about land for nobles, and had little to do with reclaiming the Holy Land for Christendom)

The figure of 3,000 for the Inquisition is a revised number based on one strain of analysis. And your remarks about the Crusades are flat-out false. The Albigensian Crusade was specifically organized to wipe out Gnostic heretics in France and the range of figures that reputable historians have cited in this case go from about 100,000 to possibly 1,000,000. (Matthew White and R. J. Rummel are good [NOT PERFECT] sources for a broad, detailed perspective on these questions.)

EDIT:

I'm going to refer to a list I wrote out in another post:

I hesitate to make an assertion like, "Christianity has killed X people over the ages." But let's grant that an assertion like this, perhaps parsed more specifically as, "Nations ruled by Christians have killed X people over the ages," is true, maybe with a qualifier like "and their beliefs were highly relevant to the killing." How many people = X?

The number is actually, surprisingly even to me, very high. Like, way higher than for anything we might be normally tempted to fill in for "Nations ruled by _____," like "Islam" or "Communism," say.

To start our list, I'll give you an obscure example. The government of China before Mao's, the KMT, was terribly murderous towards its people. Not nearly so much so as Mao's was, but they did, after all, kill more people in a single act, than any other government ever did in the entire known history of the world: they deliberately caused the Yellow River to flood in 1938, wiping out as many as about 900,000 of their own people in one decision and decisive event. Overall, when the kinds of slavery they imposed and the starvation they brought about, and the executions and massacres they perpetrated, are factored in, the balance of the statistics favors an order of magnitude of about 10,000,000 for KMT democide.

What hath Nanjing to do with Jerusalem? Well, the leader of the KMT was a Christian, that's what.

This wasn't the first time, or even the most acute time, honestly, that a Christian leader in China oversaw a lot of death. The Taiping Rebellion, which killed maybe ten million to forty million people, was caused by a Christian movement that arose in the region. IIRC the only information we have that would let us guess at the responsibility of the Christian rebels for that death toll, comes from a comparison of the statistics for the capture of the capital: the rebels killed 25,000 residents, the government killed 100,000, so let's say at most the Taiping rebels killed 10,000,000 people, somehow or other, over that time period. But really, most of those who died did so as a side-effect of the war, from deprivation attending the desolation of the landscape, so depending on how much or how so the rebels contributed to that factor, they might have had more blame to bear for the population loss as such.

So far, so what? Why am I not bringing up more obvious culprits, like the Inquisitions or the witch-hunts or the (Middle Eastern and Albigensian) Crusades? I could also refer to tsarist Russia's Circassian genocide in the 1800s, or the "infinite number" of miscellaneous heretics that Robert Bellarmine claimed had been exterminated by his day, or the Ustashe holocaust in WW2 Yugoslavia, and so on and on. Such assorted interludes add up to many, many millions of people. Throw in the 30 Years' War, and what the Khanate forces did to Muslims (outside the context of the European Crusades) in relation to their leaders Mongke and Hulagu, and you get a part of the X of the dead, comparable to the figures just outlined for China.

But that's not even the half of it. Let's start firing the big guns by referring to the Native Americans. Sure, a lot of the dying here was caused by diseases that were unintentionally introduced. But the invaders hardly did anything to help the natives resist the diseases, enslaving and starving so many that many more perished for that reason on top of whatever alien sickness had come to afflict them. When the Mongolian armies invaded China earlier, there was a similar pattern of atrocities + famine + plague, and the population collapse is estimated at 30,000,000 to 60,000,000, with one fairly random source claiming that about 18,500,000 of this was due to outright killing (I am unaware how this number was arrived at; it comes from a relatively credible set of historians but I stress the "relatively," here). So if anywhere from 20,000,000 to 100,000,000 Native Americans died due to the European invasion, then for all we know, anywhere from 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 of this might have been due to causes for which the invaders were entirely culpable. David Stannard quotes one priest (IIRC) aware of the matter at the time, who said something about the attendant plagues being fortuitous for his and his associates' cause, as it helped with the depletion of the native population overall; so I wonder whether we ought to excuse the invaders at all, for the vast morbidity of those times and places?

If you're skeptical of capitalism, or even if you're sympathetic to things like communism, you might be tempted to blame capitalism in some relevant sense for British India's string of enormous famines. But under the circumstances (especially given e.g. Max Weber's analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, say) you could just as well say that it was Britain as a Christian country that killed who knows how many millions, if not tens of millions, of Indians, that way.

And then there's Africa. And not just, or even mostly, the European slave trade. That is believed, on what evidence I know not, to have resulted in anywhere from a few million, to maybe 60,000,000 (I'll confess, not a very plausible number), deaths. But this was only a prelude to things like the Congo Free State, or (most of) France's holocausts in its African colonies (the Algerian democide began earlier than the land grab of the late 1800s), or Portugal's, or whoever's. Again, we're talking somewhere on the order of magnitude of 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 dead---or maybe even more (since it's possible that about 20,000,000 died in just the Congo Free State alone).

I could go on, honestly: pogroms against Jews here or there, things America has done (plenty), Yugoslavia again (in the 1990s; think of that one massacre in which 8,000 people died, for which the government of Belgium, IIRC, later resigned!); I'm probably forgetting quite a few case studies. Suffice it to say, it appears entirely possible that Christian nations have killed something like 100,000,000 people over the ages, maybe even around 200,000,000. Oftentimes in episodes that took place in eras when the Earth's population was far smaller than it is now.

Now, the title of this thread is "A weird argument for Christianity," because you know, why on Earth did a religion started by a man like Jesus Christ lead to this? You'd hope that if the rhetoric of the Holy Spirit indwelling us were true, then even if Christians weren't perfect, there wouldn't be such an eerie correlation between the history of atrocity, and the history of Christianity, or whatever. Yet there it is.

So, as a Christian, I think this is why: when we do metaphysics, we often end up thinking of substances and their properties, which are the objects that correspond to how in language we have subjects and their predicates. Evil is the opposite of good, is its active negation: evil is either corruption or destruction, the negation of good properties or the negation of good substantial objects. The demons (to talk "in-universe" re: the Christian narrative) would be hungry to corrupt Christians into destroying more life than any others would, I suspect. The fact that it is Christianity that is so correlated with the demons' expression in history, is symptomatic of the fact that the Christian movement is supposed to be the best exemplar of God's grace and power. If the Church were not triumphant in itself, the demons would not want to possess so many of its militant followers.

QED...

100k to 1 million? in a town of only 10K?

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I dont kmow why I should, you haven't sited a single source except your opinion so far.

Um, Matthew White, R. J. Rummel, David Stannard, and David Plaisted, are the ones I've cited by name so far. I could also quote Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky while I'm at it. And many others besides.

100k to 1 million? in a town of only 10K?

You think the Beziers massacre was the only killing? Or that the death toll in Beziers could only have been 10,000? It might've been 20,000 or even more.

Remember, Robert Bellarmine referred to an infinite number of heretics being killed by the Church. And in the Cautio Criminalis the author said that the witch-hunts were worse than recent wars. (I used White's material to gauge this statement: he lists, IIRC, the Peasants' War and the Knight's War in Germany (I think those were the names of the wars at the time) as ranging from 100,000 to 250,000 dead. I know the old estimate of 9,000,000 witches killed is no longer widely respected but I doubt the "revised" figures of 50,000 to 100,000 that I've seen, too. Based on the Cautio Criminalis comparison, I would guesstimate some figure in the hundreds-of-thousands range.)

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

[...]

Remember, Robert Bellarmine referred to an infinite number of heretics being killed by the Church. ...

Bellarmine is notorious for being quoted out-of-context (or even for having quotes outrightly fabricated) within works of Protestant/Modernist and anti-papal polemics. I'd be circumspect in employing Bellarmine attribution.

Here's the only quote (the details of which I've cobbled together from multiple links) which a quick googling would return for me:

"It remains to answer the objections of Luther and other heretics. Argument I, from the history of the Church at large. 'The church,' says Luther, 'from the beginning even to this time, has never burned a heretic.' Therefore, it does not seem to be the mind of the Holy Spirit that they should be burned.' I reply, this argument admirably proves, not the sentiment, but the ignorance or impudence of Luther. For as almost an infinite number were either burned or put to death, Luther either did not know it, and was therefore ignorant; or if he knew it, he is convicted of impudence and falsehood; for that heretics were often burned by the church, may be adduced from many examples."

-- Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de Controversiis, Tom. ii, Lib. III, cap. XXII, "Objections Answered," 1682 edition.

Disputationes de Controversiis is now available in english translation, so the quote should be verifiable.



But assuming for the sake of argument that the quote is accurate, it seems to me that "infinite number" could likely refer, not to a tally of individual human lives, but to a way of saying "an infinite variety of heretics" or "all types of heretics".

Also -- though this point would not speak against the fundaments of your thesis -- Pseudo-Bellarmine is likely using the term "church" in the sense of "Christendom/Christian nations" rather than in the sense of the sphere of the Church as opposed to that of the State.

Of course, this speculation is somewhat pointless until the source of the quote is established as being Bellarmine or not.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Thank you Wosbald. And I agree that the Protestant polemics, here, are suspect in many ways. Moreover, as the Michael Severtus(sp.?) case showcases(!), Calvinism can lead to Christian-tinged atrocities, too, re: heretics.

I will also say that, though the Inquisition gets a bad rap as the medieval Catholic Gestapo, so to speak, I know that the most up-to-date analysis does not imply this, for two reasons (of which I am aware). First, the Inquisition never had access to the kind of equipment and social structure that the Gestapo operated with and in. Second, at times the Inquisition actually acted to rein in the mob mentality in areas, leading to a reduction in oppression.

So, the fantastical death toll attributed to the Inquisition in e.g. Plaisted's essay, does not strike me as likely. And although I think a figure in the range of several hundred thousand over all areas and periods is plausible, this is a drop in the bucket of blood, so to speak, compared to many other campaigns, programs, etc. that produced mass democide.

[Skyweir]

Ahhh I love the level of knowledge explored here.

Wos and Mig kudos .. and brilliant points made in a fabulously collaborate spirit. This is of even greater value than the extent of knowledge you individually possess.

It adds to your independent credibility as sources of a sound and defensible wealth of knowledge.