I dont kmow why I should, you haven't sited a single source except your opinion so far.Mighara Sovmadhi wrote: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.270 million people have been killed by Jihad for Islam.
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.)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)
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 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.