The Editor, Sir:
It is a dismissive comment that one hears every so often even from people who ought to know better: "More people have been killed in the name of God and religion than any other cause. I can't be bothered with Christianity."
Apart from the sloppiness of thought involved in this quotation - there is no link established between the tenets of Christianity and the alleged killings "in the name of God" - the allegation of religion and God as the cause of the worst killings is simply not true. Institutionalised atheism leads the field in human carnage.
As Christian apologist Greg Koukl says in his fascinating recent book Tactics (Zondervan, 2009), "Over 66 million wiped out under Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev; between 32 million and 61 million Chinese killed under Communist regimes since 1949; one-third of the eight million Khmers - 2.7 million people - were killed between 1975 and 1979 under the communist Khmer Rouge." (p177, his emphasis).
The Guinness Book of World Records 1992 (Facts on File, 1991, 92) is the source of Koukl's statistics. It may be helpful to point out that the estimated war dead from World War I is 15 million and for World War II, 48.2 million.
Another Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias tackles this popular misconception in similar vein and after mentioning the killings under Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, et al, urges "The attackers of religion have forgotten that these large-scale slaughters at the hands of anti-theists were the logical outworking of their God-denying philosophy. Contrastingly, the violence spawned by those who killed in the name of Christ would never have been sanctioned by the Christ of the Scriptures. Those who killed in the name of God were clearly self-serving politicisers of religion, an amalgam Christ ever resisted in His life and teaching...Atheism, on the other hand, provides the logical basis for an autonomous, domineering will, expelling morality." (Can Man Live Without God, Word publishing, 1994, 22-23).
I am, etc.,
Rev CLINTON CHISHOLM
clintchis@yahoo.com
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