Joe Carter’s “Theocracy in America” reports on CNN’s Christiane Amanpour’s 6 hour miniseries God’s Warriors.
God’s Warriors oh I get it, the, “more people have been killed in the name of religion than any other belief system,” argument which isn’t even remotely true. More people have been killed in the name of secular humanistic philosophies and practices than have been killed on behalf of religion.
In spite of that Amanpour takes her turn at the old Liberal scare that religion is bad and Christians are attempting to impose their beliefs on the government and on the society in general. She does this by lumping all three monotheistic faiths together as if to say, “see not one is different than the other they all commit acts of violence!”
As if there is no degree to acts of violence, for instance my use of violence to defend myself from your unwarranted attacks is not the same as your unprovoked attack against me. You understand what I mean.
Liberals used this Bogeyman as one of their initial reasons for opposing George W. Bush as well they use hatred of Western Judeo-Christian values as their main opposition against religion.
Where Amanpour and people like her show their ignorance about religion first, is in this simplistic act of broad brushing all religious belief with the same brush so to speak and second, to assume that an anti-religious secular worldview is superior to a faith based worldview.
If Amanpour’s point is that acts of violence disqualifies religion as a valid belief system or makes religion hypocritical then no human belief system would escape such a condemnatory and judgmental attack.
Amanpour could have just as easily done a miniseries entitled Science’s Warriors, or antireligious secular Humanism’s Warriors that could have produced enough hatred, violence and carnage that would put a stop to the ignorantly inane mantra that, “religion is bad, no religion is good.”
For instance according to Dinesh D'Souza the very best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem witch trials. How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually, fewer than 25.
Yet the witch trials are almost always referred to as proof of the greatest Christian malfeasance this country has ever seen. Secularist use the witch trials as an anti religion bogeyman
D’Souza points out, ‘Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany, "The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries."
In his bestseller "The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins contends that most of the world's recent conflicts - in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, and in Sri Lanka - show the vitality of religion's murderous impulse.’
Yet D’Souza states that the problem with this critique is that it exaggerates the crimes attributed to religion, while ignoring the greater crimes of secular fanaticism.
D’Souza’s claim is that about 110,000 lives were taken in the greatest rebukes against Christianity the Crusades and the Inquisitions how does that compare to secular killing?
Communism has claimed more than 100 million lives. There as been 29M legal abortions performed in the United States, 1970-95. (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 47 No. SS-2). In addition to an estimated worldwide number of abortions numbering: 804M to 929M (1920-2006) in total.
Finally including abortions 1.7 Billion people have been kill by secular governments just in the 20th Century alone.
That’s 1.7 Billion secular killings compared to what secularist claim is religion’s evil historical 110,000 deaths in the Crusades and the Inquisitions. Even today’s Islamic killings can’t compare to the massive amounts of secular human slaughter.
The next time someone attempts to demonstrate how evil religion is "with all that killing in the name of God" just remember that the killing in the name of man is much greater and far less noble!
If people like Christiane Amanpour would tell the truth about man's killing man in the name of man, his government and his science she would have six days of miniseries not just six hours!
