Sugar writes: This is the usual claptrap from an apologist. Let’s consider some of the “humane” actions of the religious:
1. Thirty Years’ War (in which at least one-third of the German population was murdered in the name of religion)
2. The Inquisition
3. The witch trials (hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered)
4. The Holocaust (Hitler was a Catholic)
5. The Soviet atrocities (Stalin was raised and trained in a Russian Orthodox school)
6. 2,000 years of hell in which billions of lives were ruined.
It’s no wonder that millions have been sent screaming to their deaths in the name of religion.
And this is yet another feeble attempt of a historically-challenged atheist to hide the responsibility of his fellow godless for the worst evils of mankind. Let’s consider the points:
1. Yes, I’ll give him the Thirty Year’s War. Numbers too high, but okay. The politics of the Habsburg empire had more than a little to do with it as well, of course. But a valid point, although he seems to want to include ancillary deaths, which is never done in the case of WWII etc.
2. Historians estimate around 6,000 people were killed in the 356 years of the Inquisition. This is half the number slain by Turks in the event which prompted Queen Isabella – the State, in other words, not the Church – to instigate the Inquisition. And this is number two on his list?
3. Witch trials – I’ll give him but not the “hundreds of thousands”. Around 65,000 in 250 years is the current consensus estimate. Rather less than the 3.3 million slain in four years by Kampuchean atheists 28 years ago.
4. Most atheists were raised in some religion or another. To what diocese did Mr. Hitler belong? Why did he write to the Nazi heirarchy that the Church had to be destroyed? Why did he describe Christianity as a pathology? Strange behavior for a Catholic, don’t you think? One wonders in what religion Sugar was raised. Shall we number him as one of them for the rest of his life?
5. This conveniently skates over the atheism written into Soviet law, as well as the inherent godlessness of Marxism itself. And, of course, it leaves out Lenin and Trotsky, who only happened to be the architects of the Soviet Union and world revolution. One marvels that Sugar does not assert that Chairman Mao was a Baptist minister. Surely he must have attended a missionary school somewhere.
6. Whatever. Read the Chronicles of the Assyrian Kings if you believe that mass slaughter has anything to do with religion. It can; it usually doesn’t.
In other words, in five examples, Sugar lists two godless atrocities and is forced to go back to 1481, 1618 and 1428 just to find three examples of atrocities he can blame on Christians, amounting to around 375,000 homicides committed over 636 years. Evil, to be sure, but no thinking individual apprised of the historical facts would consider them to be worthy of being numbered among mankind’s greatest tragedies, considering that they cumulatively represent only 75 percent of the number of American children killed every year in bicycle accidents. The total is also less than ANY of the 23 major massacres committed by legally atheist governments in the past 70 years alone. That does not even include the massive Molochian holocaust of global abortion, which can be laid at the feet of secularism if not atheism per se.
If Sugar was seriously interested in attacking religion, he would have brought up many valid Islamic examples ranging from India to the Sudan, but he is more of an anti-Christian bigot than a defender of atheism. At least he was smart enough to avoid bringing up the old atheist lunacy about all wars being caused by religion, which is very easily dismissed. So, give him that, but nothing else.