Kerby Anderson

One of the perennial arguments by atheists is that religion is dangerous and that religion has led to wars and untold suffering. I thought about that claim when I was interviewing Ray Comfort about his new book and video on atheism. He has some arresting statistics.

One of the perennial arguments by atheists is that religion is dangerous and that religion has led to wars and untold suffering. I thought about that claim when I was interviewing Ray Comfort about his new book and video on atheism. He has some arresting statistics.

He documents that the ideas of Karl Marx, for example, led to the deaths of more than 90 million people. Joseph Stalin alone accounted for the deaths by murder or starvation of as many as 60 million. Mao Zedong is responsible for that many or more. Add to that the atheistic regimes of dictators like Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler, and you can see that it is atheism that is has been the scourge of humanity.

In some of his earlier books, Dinesh D’Souza came to a similar conclusion that the atheist regimes were much more deadly than any religious conflict. He wrote that “death caused by Christian rulers over a five-hundred-year period amounts to only one percent of the deaths caused by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao in the space of a few decades.”

Dr. R.J. Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He estimates that since 1900, the total body count is approximately 262 million dead from the bloody hands of atheistic governments.

The Encyclopedia of Wars says that there have been 1,763 wars in human history. About 123 could be considered religious wars, and over half of those religious wars were pursued in the name of Islam. Even so, that number represents merely 7 percent of all wars. In other words, 93 percent of all wars were not religious but political in nature.

These are just a few facts and statistics to consider the next time you hear an atheist rail against religion and claim that religion is dangerous and the reason we have had so many wars and suffering in the world.