For years I have heard people make the comment, “More people have been killed in the name of religion…” yet I have never actually heard anyone justify the comment.
It seems to me that imperialism and boundary wars seem to lead the body count.
If someone could give me a little history or semantics lesson I would appreciate it.
T
In reality, it is quite likely that a tribe waged a war against another tribe, and used god to justify it. As time went on, people actually read the writting describing how god told them to kill outsiders, were influenced by it, and went on to kill outsiders.
Later, religions clashed over who had the right god, and that also bears the blame. Would you like a highly biased list of historical events towards my point of view? Enter in “christianity”, or “religion” +“victims” into a search engine. However, be aware that people will always claim that the stated reasons were not the real ones, and ignore the influence the books might have had to do with the childhood of this general or that.
However, should you attempt to define it as a question of numbers, rather then rationals, it is likely to be suited for GD.
Oh, also note that the complete statement is either “More people have been killed in the name of religion then in any other cause", and that is a matter of defintion. or “More people have been killed in the name of religion then in the name of atheism." That is true, since by defintion, atheism isn’t something people kill in the name of.
Whenenver this comes up in conversation (or more likely a lively debate) I say - “What? Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot didn’t kill anybody?”
My 2 cents worth.
Yes, they did indeed kill people. However, the question was ““More people have been killed in the name of religion…” "
If someone could give me a little history or semantics lesson I would appreciate it.”
The three you mentioned killed people, because they had an “expantioinist foreign policy” and necause they wanted to silence those who disgreed with them. My answer to it, which by the way comes under samantics, is that these people were not doing things “In the name of” atheism in any way whatsoever.
However, the crusades were justified by the fact that god told people to take back the holy land,as was joan of arc’s war with the english, every single example of jews conquering a neighboring tribe, the current happenings with israel, and so much more.
If your asking whether religion has been the cause of most wars, then it gets very complicated. You essentially have to imagine a world in which everything else was the same but there was no religion and see if the death toll was higher or lower than our one. This would be something suitable for great debates but it certainly has no factual answer.
If your asking whether religion could plausibly be a contributing factor to most wars, then almost certainly since, until very recently, everybody was religious to a certain degree and you can always manufactur religious reasons to go to war.
But that’s about as useful as saying “Most people who kill have 10 toes”. Correlation does not imply causation.
Wow. As soon as I read Scott’s last sentense I said somebody will be along to mention Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Didn’t take long. Anyway, let me say two things about that:
First of all I would disagree that atheism is by definition something you can’t kill in the name of. There are plenty of athiest (not all of course) not only don’t believe in god, but who are deeply oppposed to religion, as such. And believe it’s bad for society. You could certainly kill for that reason. However, I don’t know of when that’s actually happened on a large scale.
So secondly, then, what about Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot? Yeah, they were athiests but they didn’t kill (or manage to convince others to kill) in the name of Athiesm. They did it in the name of Communism. It wasn’t a question of killing believers in the name of unbelief, it was killing believers in the name of a different belief. I would argue that that’s very different than killing “in the name of atheism”. I would say Communism provided the equivilaent justification that religion does.
To bring this back to the OP, I’d say despite the numbers Communism racked up in the 20th century, more people have still been killed *in the name of * (theistic) religion than anything else. Which is not the same as because of . But the need for justification is signifigent. I can understand the thinking behind the idea that we could the number of atrocities committed in the world if we made it harder to justify.
I’d point out that things that are ultimately done for reasons of imperialism or boundary security or many other things are often done ‘in the name of’ religion. Invoking gods has been, for thousands of years, a powerful form of millitary propaganda.
Jonestown and all of the Crusades are easy calls, of course. However, some wars that were fought between religious groups were more about land or power. The Nazi Holocaust was against the Jews, but it could be argued that it was a matter of ethnic hatred against a group that was perceived to control money and power. Did the Nazis ever claim to be acting on behalf of Jesus? The long-running difficulties in Israel might seem to be purely Jew vs. Muslim. I believe it’s a question of whose homeland Israel is. The insurgency in Iraq could be seen as Sunni vs. Shiite, or Muslim vs. Christian, but it is also the ousted vs. the new rulers.
The OP’s quote is true, but you have to place the emphasis correctly;
“More people have been killed in the name of religion…”
Most wars are ultimately about resources and status. You’ve got 'em, I want 'em. Religion is just a very useful means of justifying a war, just in the same way it’s a very useful means of social control.
So lots of things get done in the name of religion, but that doesn’t mean it’s the real reason.
Which is kind of much the same as others have already said, now I read in preview…
Even the Crusades were as much about redirecting conflicts in Europe outside it as much as religion. And a related but motive was to secure pilgrimage rights from the recent conquerers of Jerusalem, who were comparitively barbaric aside from the older Muslim rulers.
You’re shooting yourself in the foot with these two, Scott.
There were a limited number of wars against the Canaanites and later Philistines that were based on religion. The Amalekites being the single famous example that everyone likes to trot out, but the majority of the wars were simple land and power grabs. (Even the Amalekite story does not have God ordering their destuction because they have bad gods, but in vengeance because they had attacked the Hebrews.) Claiming that god is “on our side” in a power battle is hardly the same as claiming that a god or religion caused the war.
Today, aside from a tiny number of people such as Meir Kahane and an occasional Palestinian counterpart, nobody in the region is “killing for God.” The issues are power and land and one of the markers to distinguish opponents happens to be the religion of one’s ancestors (since there are a lot of “atheistic Jews” in Israel and some unknown number of atheistic or agnostic Palestinians whose parents were Muslim or Christian). The same thing is going to happen when you look at Northern Ireland (where Ian Paiseley is nearly the only one who thinks the religious aspect is of any importance). Similarly, when we look at the “religious wars” following the Protestant Reformation, we cannot find a single war in which Catholics and Protestants lined up opposite each other and waged mayhem; in every one of those wars, both sides used troops of the other’s religion based on the expediency of who had or wanted power. Again, when we look at the dissolution of Yugoslavia, horrible slaughter was inflicted on people based on their perceived religion–but religion was used as a cultural marker. Few of the people involved even adhere to the religious beliefs of their grandparents (which was why it was called ethnic cleansing, not religious cleansing). So you were right that people will challenge your claims, but that is because your claims are faulty.
The Crusades I will grant (at least the first two–the next four were much more about power, and even the Firtst Crusade had a strong non-religious motive behind it). I will also grant the crusade against the Albigensians. Of course, somewhere along the line, you’re going to have to deal with the Tartars and Mongols who had no religious motives for their wars of aggression. The deaths in the Slave Trade in Africa were not done in the name of religion. The genocide in the Americas was not carried out in the name of religion. (There was a “convert the heathen” element among the Spanish and French, as part of the cultural milieu, but no one announced an intent to conquer land and kill the inhabitants based on a desire to enhance their religion or even using the weak excuse that “god said to do it.”)
Have horrible wars and persecutions arisen from religion? Absolutely.
Have the majority of wars or violent deaths been the result of religion? There does not seem to be any evidence for that.
I was perhaps a bit terse in my original reply to the OP asking about history and semantics.
In my personal experience this usually comes up in the pub where someone will point out that they are an athiest and then come out with the remark that more people… Knowing my friends, the implication is religion is bad and if there was no religion then we would all be better off. As a quick retort I will usually say what I posted back in the beginning. Meaning - Shut your gob. You’re full of it - people have been killing each other for all sorts of reasons, and if you think religion is bad here are some examples of people killing each other for nonreligious reasons.
That said (since this is not in GD) - if you are looking for the source didn’t someone once say that religion is the crack of the working shlubs?
You might want to ask him if he started it.
Thanks to all who contributed. Excellent stuff, without the political and religious bias I usually get.
tomndebb - Thanks, especially for this last part.
adirondack_mike - Isn’t it always in the pub where it usually starts. hehe
I agree and think it is it safe to say that in a world without religion we would still find many reasons to kill each other.
Shalmanese mentioned that “If your asking whether religion has been the cause of most wars it gets very complicated, and that it would be something suitable for great debates but it certainly has no factual answer.”
But that is where my question really comes from (knowing full well that even the numbers of dead are variable).
So does/did religion exacerbate the issue or was it just another reason on the list of why we kill each other, and if it is just on the list is the statement “More people have been killed in the name of religion then in any other cause” true or not?
T
I can’t quite agree that Mao’s killings were done out of an expansionist foreign policy. Many were heavily motivated by the desire to consolidate power within China - witness the numerous purges and the targeted murder of intellectuals and other “counterrevolutionary” figures during the Cultural Revolution. However, a hell of a lot of folks died during the Great Leap Forward, and their deaths were clearly the result of misguided government action, though it’s hard to decide whether they really qualify as killings - essentially, Mao’s policies created a famine and then deliberately ignored it.
I think the OP is just unanswerable, though. tomndebb, with his typical irritating degree of intelligence 
pointed out well many examples of conflicts that are highly political in nature with a thin veneer of religious justification on top. How do you tease apart the politics and the religion that underlie a battle? The Crusades certainly were heavily political in nature, but they served also to prop up the Catholic Church, a religious organization. Were those, then, more political or more religious?
I think the answer depends on making distinctions that are just not possible in real life. The point was made above that you’d need to compare us to an identical world save that it was completely nonreligious. How exactly can you assign a death toll when the causes are complex and both religious and political at the same time?
Just for shits & giggles: how many people were killed at the hands of the Inquisition?
Probably less than you’d expect …
For example, in his The Spanish Inquisition (1997; Phoenix, 1998, p60), while recognising the uncertainties involved particularly in the toll for its early years, Henry Kamen suggests that the total number executed by this branch over its existence was unlikely to be more than 2000.