Perhaps a better way to put it is to say that religion has been the perfect excuse for some people through the ages to do horrible things to other people with whom they disagreed. When I think of Christianity I cannot help but think of those things too.
Well, well, my little Rationalist friend, I can think of a few societies that ought to please you nicely, since one characteristic which they do share is an official hostility to religion: Jacobin Revolutionary France, the USSR, Nazi Germany, the People's Republic of China, Pol Pot's Cambodia. I'll be more than happy to defend the record of 2,000 years of Christendom if you are willing to defend merely all the secular regimes of the last 200 years. The funny thing is, I have never yet met a secularist who wants to defend the actions of these famously godless governments. Nope, it seems "it isn't fair", it seems we have to compare the real world of religious history to a secular world of their imagination, not to the anti-religious governments that have ruled in real time and space. Historian Paul Johnson (Modern Times) has calculated that the great secular regimes of our age have murdered at least 100 million people. What do you think? How do the secular regimes stack up against those nasty murderous religions? |
