Thursday, February 21, 2008

War and religion

Gene Edward Veith provides a quotation from a lecture delivered by David Aikman at Patrick Henry College. Aikman reinforces one of the points made about "the irrational atheist" in the last post.
.... If the entire list of victims of every religious war ever fought, from the Crusades, through the wars of religion in Europe after the Protestant Reformation, to the brutal attacks upon each other of Muslims and Hindus in the sub-continent of India is added up, that number is completely dwarfed by those murdered by Communist regimes in the twentieth century.

According to some estimates, the number of people murdered under Communism, whether in wars started by Communist regimes, or as a result of internal repression against domestic adversaries, or in policies deliberately intended to produce starvation (Stalin’s holocaust in the Ukraine through starvation in 1933 murdered between seven and eleven million men, women, and children) approaches a total of 100 million.

Then there is Hitler, who by general agreement deliberately murdered about twelve million people but started a war that took the lives of some 50 million. Hitler wasn’t technically an atheist – we’ll come to this in a moment –but there is no question that he acted as if there were no Divine personality or moral code above him to which he was going to be held accountable. In short, he certainly acted like someone in total rebellion against God. ....
Veith also provides a link to Dr. Aikman's lecture, "Weaknesses of the New Atheism," which will download as a pdf.

The butcher’s bill of atheism — Cranach: The Blog of Veith

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