If we killed all of the "red, brown and green, representing Marxism, fascism and environmental extremism" people, what would that total be?

Do we think that all "religions" are equivalent in this regard? Could it be that Christianity is of greater utility that Aztec death-worship? The judgement of history seems to have been plain

Utility? That's an odd standard.

Christianity requires blood just as much as the Aztec religion did. The Aztecs were more upfront about it and for every one they killed, Christians killed a hundred.

I did a little calculation a few weeks ago. It's pretty clear than Christians killed more Jews than Nazis did, even if we say, incorrrectly, that Nazis were not Christians.

This is a pretty silly argument, but Kenny is hanging his hat on cumulative numbers. In the death category, taken that way, Christianity wins hands down.

Harry inhabits a special world. By his logic,the Jacobins were christian since French, and Stalin since he was educated in a monastery. Sixty million dead at the hands of ideologues during the course of 70 years was a bit out of the ordinary.

You're the one blowing smoke, Harry. The Ideologies did all theirs within 100 years, while the Church did its over 16 centuries. Looking at the SAME PERIOD, so we're really comparing apples to apples, reveals a different picture.

Christianity got a late start, not getting violent until they got hold of the reigns of power via the "Donation of Constantine". And, of course, you don't bother with Islam, which started right off the bat being bloody and violent. The comparison detracts from your immediate objective.

Let's take a look at the RATES. I'd say the Church's kill-rate peaked during the various Religious Wars coming out of the Middle ages, when the technology of slaughter was improving. I'd say the deaths caused after the "enlightenment", when men threw out the clerics in the State and put in non-clerics to run things, shouldn't be counted against the Church, but against Secularism. Or are you saying that the deaths during the French Revolution should be counted AGAINST the Church, even though the heads of nuns and priests were literally rolling?

As for the Period of Imperialism: the missionaries went in first, and the soldiers and merchants came in afterwards. Or are you buying into the BS of the White Man's Burden that the Imperialists used to justify their raping of foreign peoples in order count deaths during that period to the Church instead of to the SECULAR state?

Current rates of Christian-originated slaughter are low and going down, while the green slaughter is high and probably still climbing. Your statistics professor would probably give you a "D" if he was in a good mood.

as usual, the eagar-bot has been mis-programmed and is spitting out garbage. i would ask him to provide documentation for his chin music, but of course he never does. on the plus side, he is my favorite fool.

If you're going to do rates, Ptah, then the appropriate metric is not time but the size of the target population.

Secularists aren't even in the ballpark vs. extermination of Albigenses, Canary Islanders etc.

However, I was just totting up the number of Christian villages in Europe, and assessing them a murdered Jew every year or so and multiplying that by 1,500 years, more or less.

Jews alone exceed even the highest estimates of the various totalitarian murders of the 20th century.

Actually, when I pull numbers out of my butt, I come up with two Jews per village. So in reality the death toll is even worse than Harry alleges.

Time to base policy on the PRESENT, harry, not on such a distant past that the perpetrators are dead and where the living are free, not bound, to make different decisions. Hanging dead and dried mummies killed by long-dead others around the necks of the living, to proclaim equivalence by questionable accounting to cover for the still fresh and dripping corpses hung around the necks of your compatriots reflects badly on what passes for your moral judgment and sensibilities.

What you're evading is that people are making different decisions NOW, and you can't handle them.

Pulling numbers out of your butt is a definite statement of the quality of the data inputs to your calculations.

its the rare fool that can provide such high quality humor as hilarrious (that's your new roman name). please tell me you still live at home with your mother, it would complete the tableau so nicely.

While I was out shopping, I was musing over the wierd sort of familiarity that Harry's questionable argument had, and finally put my finger on it: Reliance on the absence of hard data to justify a "modest" initial assumption that is equally unsupported, buttressed by long time periods and a large population that is not in dispute to come up with a impressively large result that relies on blind loyalty to the Euler method of estimation. Sorry Harry: wild-ass extrapolation doesn't work here any more than it does with Evolution, although I'm not surprised you naturally went with that "scientific" method.

Oh, and another thing: the assumption of two Jewish deaths per village per year in europe TACITLY assumes that ALL european villages had Jews, that they ALL were antisemitic enough to persecute ALL those Jew for the ENTIRE time period. That sounds eerily similar to the argument you're trying to PROVE.

Finally, Harry KNOWS the assumption allows a rather pernicious hole: A village that killed ALL ITS JEWS AT ONCE (genocide) would come up in HIS numbers game smelling better than one village with a gang of toughs who gets their kicks killing the occasional jew every year for several centuries, since the former would NOT HAVE ANY JEWS to kill in subsequent years (The validity of the assumption that Jews would willingly move INTO such a village after an incident of genocide, restoring a population that can be persecuted can best be answered by a Jew.)

He could, of course, have dispensed with this nonsense and save his arse (and appearance of scientific savoir-faire) by instead arguing that Secularists are different. His problem is trying to deny me and Orrin the right to use the same argument vis a vis Religion.

I took all those into account, Ptah.

The figures I used were 100,000 villages, 1,200 years and one murdered Jew every other year or so. Take off your socks and do the math.

These are ranges. 1,200 years is too long for Russia, which did not become Christian until 1000. Before that, of course, it would not have occurred to a Russian to kill a Jew for being a Jew.

Once they became Christians, they probably made up for lost time by a degree of enthusiasm.

No one who has read European history would think one dead Jew per village every other year is unreasonable. After all, burning 500 Jews at once (a frequent occurrence) would equal my guessed-at rate for a thousand years.

All my estimates are way on the low side, especially number of villages. India, with a population of similar size, had 900,000 villages.

If you have more believable numbers, let's see 'em.

Oh, I can multiply just fine, Harry. It's just that as it's YOU making the assertions, it's YOU that has the burden of proof. You reach into your ass to pull out stinky numbers, and when I object to them, you demand "Well, can you pull out of your ass numbers that are less stinky?" Pardon me, but I'd rather get my numbers from a better place if I'm going to criticize someone with the results, and have questions about the REAL agenda of someone who doesn't bother to do his homework so he CAN criticize someone. Cite some links.

Here's what I dug up.

http://www.wanniski.com/PrintPage.asp?TextID=4174

http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/christians&jews.htm

http://www.skyscript.co.uk/ezra.html

http://www.aitzhayim.org/library_files/Katz%20on%20Jewish%20Life%20in%20Medieval%20Europe.htm

http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa040498.htm

http://killeenroos.com/5/Plight.htm

http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2004/2004-10.html

Seems that persecutions really started after 1050, and the favored method of persecution was explusion and loss of civil rights on the latter end of your period cited. I'm rather surprised that the only reliable estimate of Jewish death rates is in the last link, and it cites 100,000 Jews during the Inquisition DURING THE ENTIRE 13TH CENTURY. Seems that the rate should be closer to one Jew per village per CENTURY, when the persecution was at its WORST.

A personal note: My ancestry includes Sephardic Jews who migrated to the New World during the Inquisition.

This thread has taken a most fascinating turn. Harry is behaving exactly like the young-earth creationists he so despises: invent your own evidence in support of your own agenda; buttress it with a shoddy hodge-podge of assorted facts, numbers, and speculation; and dare anyone who challenges you to prove that you're wrong.

P.S. Nice work, Ptah.

well, the number i pulled out of harry's magic ass, is one ice cream cone per jew per village per year.
i wish i could choose a salary the way harry chooses his numbers ( i guess i could, but it would be equally useful).

Well, that was just Jews, and your mileage may vary.

I didn't even mention Guanches, Prussians, Avars, witches, Greeks, Turks, Moors, children, women, priests, Protestants, Catholics, Anabaptists, Cathars etc. etc.

Who was counting? Nobody, but the cumulative total must have been in the tens of millions.

The British claimed that the Thuggee sect of Hindus murdered 40,000/year. I don't know how long that went on, but that's 4 million per century.

Then there's 50 million dead in the Christian war in south China in the 1850s.

Just this week I saw a figure of 2 million/yr due to clitoridectomy in Africa. I don't know how valid that is. But if correct, that's equal to the highest estimates of malaria deaths.

And the idea that religious people, particularly Christians, used to kill but got over it is preposterous. Have you forgotten Rwanda? You don't even have to forget Uganda. That's going on right now.

Your host demands every other day that we drop atomic bombs on one capital or another; and on alternate days he laments we didn't drop enough atomic bombs in the past.

Why harry, exactly WHAT part of your performance in this thread would lead me, or anyone else, to believe that you're a competent estimator?

If the density of comments you accuse OJ of making is as high as you say it is, producing the links would be child's play, no?

Ah. After thinking and sleeping on it, I see your point, harry: I'm being parochial and thinking only about the two true religions, while you're thinking about religion in general.

If so, why stop at the late ancient world? Why not go back to the misty beginnings of time, and account any sort of violence done by every man and proto-man who acted as if he believed that there was a conscious and active entity (more often entities) working in the world, to religion?

Given that thesis, the answer to the question posed by the article that Orrin posted, "which kills more?" is obviously religion.

And this doesn't bother me.

As far as I am concerned, the vast majority of religions in the past, Judaism and Christianity excepted, are the products of men's imaginations. Whether it be an honest belief in forest spirits or a cynical manipulation of human gullibility by those using a cloak of "religion" to hide their personal agendas.

In short, long before secularism made the scene, Christian and Jewish writers have distinguished between religions constructed by man to reach out to God in man's way, and a codification of belief and practice constructed by God and presented to man, by revelation, as a "take it or leave it" option. Either man doing his own thing or doing things God's way. So what if the vast majority of religions and religious believers founded their faith in man's constructions, and piled up the corpses in the name of man-made religion? That outcome was expected, and not a surprise.

So here comes Karl Marx "scientifically" analysing history, and declares that a big part of the problem is religion. And people back then, like Harry today, slap their foreheads, exclaim "why of course!", proceeded to either ban religion or read it out of the public life, establish explicitly secular and atheist states, and manage to threaten all previous per-year records for human slaughter over a period of time which, when compared to the expanses of the ages when religion was the excuse and the poffered reason for killing, is a virtual eye-lash. A sliver.

And when this is pointed out, he continues to insist that the problem is really religion.

Me? After teasing out the complicated threads that is history, I think the problem is man doing things his own way, rather than doing things God's way. It's rather tough, in the midst of all this shit and carnage, to make out the voice of God muttering "This isn't what I had in mind when I built this place," much less make out what he's saying when he TRIES to say "I want it done THIS way."

Harry is simply not convincing to me, because I interact with God directly. I get his instructions quite clearly, follow them as best I can, and am very pleased with the results. My most recent instructions have been to exercise this capability on behalf of others. It wasn't always this way, and getting to this point involves a lot of weeding out assumptions and misconceptions that still hold Harry in their tight grip.

Or rather, that he holds with a tight grip.

However, IF one grants his definition of what is Religion, then at this present moment religion is clearly the more deadly.

But secularism, while attempting to replace religion in the hearts and minds of men, is apparently doing a darn good job of trying to displace religion in this area as well.

Do you think that preaching murderous hatred of Jews for 1,500 years might have had an effect on your religion?

It wasn't just theoretical, either. Millions and millions of Jews were killed.

If you think that was god's bidding, then nothing I can say about your religion will be half so bad as what you just said about it.

It's rather clear, harry, that you weren't paying the least attention to what I'm saying. Not surprising, since you speak authoritatively from patently obvious ignorance of religious history: If I told you I was a protestant Charismatic, you'd not the foggiest idea of the implications, and thus never realize how stupid you sound.

As for your assertion of "millions and millions", I'll let future readers of this post make the judgment of who's closer to fantasy and who's closer to reality.