From the Digg comments:
Stupid.
Makes up numbers out of thin air. No sources for his claims of who caused what wars.
Total crap.
This proves nothing, and is merely opinion.
Buried as inaccurate due to NO supporting evidence.
The source is here. I also informed everyone how they could use Wikipedia to independently verify the statistics if they doubted them.
There are also major logical weak spots in terms of confusing correlation with causation. Take “percent of wars” (how on earth is that calculated?). If it’s by population, then explicit atheism and population correlate by time, making a spurious correlation of atheism and war deaths.
The percent of wars is calculated by the number of wars waged divided by the total 1,763 wars recorded.”
Which is a wholly useless measurement. Who defines a war versus a skirmish? If war broke out in Korea, would it be the Korean war continued after a very very long ceasefire, or a second war? When did WWI stop being a bunch of a little wars and become a big one? Etc. It’s just statistically useless.
I see. So Dawkins and Harris can run around spouting off with their ontological argument about how religion implicitly causes war on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, and they are to be taken seriously, but the citation of a 1,502-page reference work completely devoted to the subject is “just statistically useless”. In answer to the question, it would surely be considered two wars, just as we refer to World War I as being distinct from WWII. For example, there are three different Covenanter’s Rebellion’s listed, in 1666, 1679 and 1685, all of which are classified as religious wars.
The definitions of the wars were decided by nine professional historians who compiled the encylopedia, including the director of the Centre for Military History and the head of the Centre for Defence Studies.
I find it all too typical of many supposedly rational atheists that their commitment to science, reason and empirical evidence only lasts as long as it supports their preconcieved prejudices. When presented with the evidence they claim to require, they are as quick to cry “I don’t like your facts” and desperately rationalize them away faster than the most benighted backwoods Bible thumper.
And that’s one of the several reasons the book is entitled “The Irrational Atheist”.