A Popular Misconception About Christianity
It is a dismissive comment that one hears ever so often even from people who ought to know better “More people have been killed in the name of God and religion than any other cause. I can’t be bothered with Christianity.”
Apart from the sloppiness of thought involved in this quotation—there is no link established between the tenets of Christianity and the alleged killings “in the name of God”— the allegation of religion and God as the cause of the worst killings is simply not true. Institutionalized atheism leads the field in human carnage. As Christian Apologist Greg Koukl says in his fascinating recent book Tactics (Zondervan, 2009), “…over 66 million wiped out under Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev; between 32 and 61 million Chinese killed under Communist regimes since 1949; one third of the eight million Khmers—2.7 million people—were killed between 1975 and 1979 under the communist Khmer Rouge.” (p.177, his emphasis).
The Guinness Book of World Records 1992 (Facts on File, 1991, 92) is the source of Koukl’s statistics. It may be helpful to point out that the estimated war dead from World War I is 15 million and for WWII, 48.2 million.
Another Christian Apologist, Ravi Zacharias tackles this popular misconception in similar vein and after mentioning the killings under Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, et al, urges “The attackers of religion have forgotten that these large-scale slaughters at the hands of antitheists were the logical outworking of their God-denying philosophy. Contrastingly, the violence spawned by those who killed in the name of Christ would never have been sanctioned by the Christ of the Scriptures. Those who killed in the name of God were clearly self-serving politicizers of religion, an amalgam Christ ever resisted in His life and teaching…Atheism, on the other hand, provides the logical basis for an autonomous, domineering will, expelling morality.” (Can Man Live Without God, Word publishing, 1994, 22-23).
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5 Responses
Some great stats here. I’ve always thought, this is one of the lies satan uses to keep people bound to himself. In our present culture we are being entertained into ignorant skeptics and knowledgeable fools. Its unfortunate that we know more about who is the coolest star on tv, but nothing about our history and fundamental Christian beliefs that can actually save our souls.
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Dnash, you are so right. It seems Christians today are uninterested in being prepared to respond to critics of the faith.
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Yes, Christians today seem uninterested in readying themselves to respond to critics of Christianity.
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I’m slightly concerned that you think atheism leads to a logical justification for mass murder, any explination for this?
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Clinton Chisholm Reply:
June 11th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
I am not suggesting that atheism necessariy leads to a justification of mass murder but without a basis for objective ethics, atheism as a worldview, lacks a rational basis for pronouncing on the wrongness or heinousness of any atrocity like mass murder or whatever. Without objective ethics or God, anything is permissible. Moral responsibility is not inherent in atheism or humanism as even humanist Paul Kurtz admits. He says …”…the humanist is faced with a crucial ethical problem: Insofar as he has defended an ethic of freedom, can he develop a basis for moral responsibility? Regretfully, merely to liberate individuals from authoritarian social institutions, whether church or state, is no guarantee that they will be aware of their moral responsibility to others. The contrary is often the case.”
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