kurt vonnegut said:
TheGreatEscape said:
The godless French Revolution that my opponents worship…
While it is impossible to give a precise number of casualties for the French Revolution due to record keeping methods used at the time, the current estimate is somewhere between 30,000-40,000 people, at least. This is most likely a conservative estimate. From 1789 until 1799, and especially during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794), execution rates increased exponentially, and as many were arrested as killed, some never to be seen again. If you include clergy, aristocrats, wealthy nobles, and soldiers, the number is probably somewhere closer to 100,000 people.
That's 100,000 French Catholics slaughtered, probably more, by the reason alone tenant of your pseudo-religion.
https://homework.study.com/explanation/how-many-people-died-in-the-french-revolution.html
Here's your godless socialist Nazis:
National Socialist German Workers' Party
"The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germansabout 11 millionis roughly what we had thought. "
And that's just the noncombatants. Now add Allie casualties lost to the godless Nazi socialists and you will see tens of millions.
https://war-history.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Want to do Stalin and Mao next?
Now you go before I add Stalin and Mao.
You should have stated with Stalin and Mao - those are your better arguments. I don't see much to be gained in a debate about which philosophy has killed more people.
Partly because its way too easy to for me to disassociate my beliefs from Mao just as it is way too easy for you to disassociate yourself from the likes of Leopold II. And also because actors like Hitler will be rejected by both sides. He was a Catholic, leading an almost completely Catholic country, and had Papal endorsements. You cannot simply state that the Nazis were godless. They very much thought themselves to be on the Christian God's side. If you get to 'no true scotsman' them off your ledger, then I get to do the same.
But I think all of this misses a bigger point. And I think that bigger point is that humans have done horrible things - and neither secularists nor Christians are an exception. We should both condemn the consequences of 80 million dead Chinese from a Marxist leader. And we should also condemn a roughly equal number of deaths in India from Christian colonialization and exploitation. The argument that Christianity has earned some right to moral authority today because they slaughtered slightly less millions of people is an argument that does not hold any water to me.
If you are still interested in scorecards, I think you have to account for Christian destructions of close to 100 million natives in the Americas - which is a complicated task given how much of that was from spread of disease. And you have to account for maybe 50 million in the Atlantic Slave Trade. And maybe over another 100 million in India. Tens of millions more during the 1800s and 1900s European colonization of Africa. SE Asia and Pacific Islander colonization, Inquisition, Crusades, 30 Years War, German Peasant's War, the KKK, Celtic wars. . . Even if your tally shows that Christianity has killed fewer than secular sources, I expect we both would be disgusted with whatever the true numbers are.
He was baptized Catholic, but Hitler wasn't a Catholic.
"If we had to describe his religious views in a single phrase, we could say that he was a pseudo-scientific evolutionary pantheist."
"Hitler's understanding of Christ was bizarre. According to him, Jesus was not a Jew. Weikart notes, "In April 1921, he told a crowd in Rosenheim that he could not imagine Christ as anything other than blond-haired and blue-eyed, making clear that he considered Jesus an Aryan. In an interview with a journalist in November 1922, he actually claimed Jesus was Germanic.""
"Although Hitler was prepared to see Jesus as having been martyred because of his opposition to Jewish practices, he did not believe in the Resurrection. According to Hitler's confidant Otto Wagener, Hitler stated that "Christ's body was removed from the tomb to keep it from being an object of veneration and a tangible relic of the great new founder of a religion."
The resurrection is everything to being a Christian. To deny the resurrection is to make the Gospel as of no effect
(I.e. declares Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, emphatically).
If you don't hold to one of the three historic creeds of the church, then you objectively are not a Christian.
The full discussion on Hitler's ideologue is found here.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/what-was-hitlers-religion
