"vincent p. norris" wrote in message
...
Aww, Wolfgang, you've been watching that TV series on teh Crusades,
haven't you!

Nope. But it sounds interesting. What show is that?

It was on the History Channel last week. Perhaps it hasn't reached the
Great Heartland yet. Check your teevee schedule if you're interested.

Thanks.

"It wasn't so very long ago that" an atheist ordered the
killing of millions of innocent people.

There have been several candidates in recent history......I won't try to
guess which one you're alluding to.

Visarionovich Djugasvili, if I remember the spelling. AKA Joe Stalin.

His score has been guesstimated at ten million (give or take a few
hundred thousand).

Not sure whether Alois Schickelgruber was an athiest.

Well, I believe most people today would agree that Uncle Joe and Adolph (not
Alois, I think, despite the lingering controversy over paternity) were both
sociopaths and/or psychopaths on a scale that would dwarf the effects of any
spiritual leanings they may have had. Nevertheless, I can hardly deny that
their scores count......but the question of which side they count FOR
remains unsettled.....as we shall soon see.

One thing is certain, though......if we include the FIRST
atheists in the tally, it's no contest.

My impression, based on my limited reading of anthropology and
history, is that human beans, going back at least as far as the
neolithic revolution, have believed in gods, goddesses, spirits,
monotheism, or whatever; so it follows that in all probability, most
of the kiling has been done by those who "believe."

Exactly, and so the critical issue in scorekeeping turns out to be a matter
of who believes just what:

"The offense that the Christians committed against Roman Law and tradition
was not called or punished as heresy--the whole vocabulary of true belief
was alien to paganism. Rather, the Christians were suspected of subversion
and treason, and they were accused of acts against public order and civic
virtue. A Christian could escape arrest and punishment by turning over his
Bible and offering a sacrifice to the gods, thus demonstrating his loyalty
and good citizenship. Still, the most pious pagans were outraged by the
theological rationale of Christianity, and they roused themselves to a
certain rigorism of their own in defense of the Pax Deorum. Like true
believers in monotheism, the persecutors of the Christians coined a new word
to describe those who denied the very existence of the old gods and
goddesses--the Christians were condemned as 'atheists'."*

Thus, Christians are no longer widely recognized as atheists today only
through a simple accident of history......there just aren't many old school
rigorous Roman polytheists around these days. But one man's deist is still
another's devil spawn. Clearly, we are surrounded by atheists, infidels,
heretics, pagans, and apostates of many stripes. The one thing they all
have in common is that each sect is the sole repository of true believers
while all the others are damned.

The upshot is that ALL mass murders have been committed.....and continue to
be committed.....by atheists, a conclusion with which I cannot disagree, and
that by far the vast majority of them have been....and continue to
be....godly and sanctified, a tradition that appears to be as entrenched and
immutable as it is disgusting.

How much has been done *because* they believe, I have no idea.

All of it.

Wolfgang
*from "God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and
Polytheism", Jonathon Kirsch, Viking Compass, 2004, p. 109.