I have often heard this statement from people, mostly atheists, that more people have been killed in the name of religion or related causes than all the wars put together.
Is this statement correct and if it is, then are there reliable sources that give approximate numbers that lend some sort of credibility to this claim?
I am not looking for a debate and so this is in GQ.
Is this correct? There is no objective answer to that question.
Are there reliable sources? No.
The problem is, usually when people kill other people they do it for number of reasons at once. You kill “them” because your god told you to kill them, but also to grab their land and cattle and women and besides you never liked them and their grandfather killed your grandfather… And usually a lot of “official” reasons are rationalizations for much ulterior motives.
So, people kill other people usually for quite material reasons, but usually add some ideological reasoning to justify killing. Since many ideologies are religion related, thus many killing are done “in the name of religion”. But there is no conceivable methodology - apart from taking time machine and mind reading device and doing statistical analysis of motives of killers - that can give you answers to your questions.
Agree with puppygod - I can’t see a factual answer to this. It seems clear that some number of people have been killed in the name of religion, but how many?
I know you said you don’t want a debate, but I’d take this to GD simply because I think it’s the only way to get any thoughts on the matter.
Edit: Typo
I agree in principle with the “there’s no way to know” statement, but the number is certainly non-negligible, and we can account for some of it.
Many, many wars have been for the specific purpose of imposing religion on folks: it’s hard to argue that the Crusades were not religious, for example. Most wars, even today, claim a “god is on our side” mentality on both sides, though probably some sides consider that a real justification more than others.
Add to that the number of people tried and executed under religious law (Sharia today, the Inquisition, Roman executions of Christians, etc.) and the number goes up a lot, too.
Extend the definition of “religion” to cover superstitions in general, and you can add in all the people (mostly women) executed for witchcraft, many under the “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”-type proclamations of various religions. This number has been given as anything from a few hundred thousand to millions.
It’s pretty hard to claim the Holocaust wasn’t killing people based on their religion.
There’s a great debate going on about whether to count the people killed by Stalin, et. al in the name of Communism as “killed in the name of atheism.” If you buy that (it seems a stretch-atheism wasn’t the reason given for killing them, as in the other cases), you can add a few million more.
Then you’ve got terrorism, and other clearly religious violence in the Middle East. The US invasion of Iraq is a weird one: clearly the US isn’t trying to impose Christianity on Iraq, but many of the people dying on the other side believe that they’re defending their faith: do you count that or not? How about Isreal vs. the Palestinians - a religious divide so intertwined with historical and political agendas it’s hard to separate them out.
Giving such a number as “millions” (or even over 100,000) is nothing more than invention, however:
Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt
The Renaissance witch persecutions were often opposed by the religious authorities. Certainly, there was a religious element to the hysteria, but neither the real numbers nor the real actions by religious groups support any serious claim that “religion” was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths of accused witches.
Actually, it would not be difficult to argue that point, at all. The Nazi murders were based on (perceived) race and many victims were non-believers and even Christians who simply had the misfortune to have had ancestors who practiced Judaism. Clearly several hundreds of years of religious persecution provided a context in which such murders could take place, but they do not fall into a simple category of “killing people based on their religion.”
Similarly, while the Thirty Years War and similar Reformation-era struggles are considered “religious” wars, a study of the actual events reveals that people often chose their religion based on their politics, weakening (not eliminating) the “religious” aspect of such strife. Even the Crusades had their origins in political conflict, with religion being used to encourage recruitment but having little to do with the sources of the conflicts.
I am not claiming that religion has played no role in warfare, but much that is simplistically attributed to religion is significantly more complex with secular sources that get lost (or ignored) when the chant of “religion has caused the most wars in ther world” gets trotted out.
The first Crusade was definately religiously influenced. The rest of them however, I believe could be argued were for alterior motives like land (okay, to be fair the Muslims started the second and third ones… though that was for land too pretty much) with “uh… how to do this… BURN THE HEATHENS!” as the manipulative rallying flag. (may I also mention all/most of these latter ones ranged from unsucessful to shame on your mother failures?)
Now that’s not to say religion didn’t have a part; without religion it would’ve been difficult to get all the people that were on board on board without a common banner like religion. “For monarchy!” doesn’t work as well as “for democracy!” For instance. To further it, France and England don’t put their differences aside for a common cause too easily, it pretty much took that banner, manipulation or not, to get them both to agree.
As one of the atheists the OP mentions who points out that religion has killed a great many people, I’d like to point out that another problem in specifying a number is the definition of “killed by religion”. For example, religious opposition to condom use and AIDS research/education has no doubt killed a great many people, but not because the religious people in question shot them. Just look at this thread; it didn’t take long for people to argue what qualified as a death caused by religion, or not.
And there’s the problem that in many cases when religion is indirectly responsible, there’s no means short of time travel to some alternate universe to tell how many would have lived without religion. Such as all the cases where religion has interfered with medical science; without religion, it could have progressed farther, but by how much ? Or, how many leaders throughout history have made bad decisions because of their religious beliefs, and not bothered to tell anyone their motive ? How would we even tell a thousand years later ?
As far as the claim that the OP is complaining about, that “more people have been killed in the name of religion or related causes than all the wars put together” ? Personally, I’d expect so; both because of my low opinion of religion and because religion is so much more pervasive than war. I don’t think anyone can provide hard numbers for either though, and you can’t answer the question properly without numbers.