Still hard to beat 20th century communist atheists in efficiently killing off their own populations or French revolutionaries in being creatively evil.
I would say that nothing beats the genocide of the Americas for sheer scope, numbers, duration, and cultural loss. All of your examples ended in a decade or two, that lasted centuries.
There is no point in making sweeping generalizations about any sizable human group - humans never behave monolithically. This certainly applies to Christianity and Islam with all their history of sects that have spent half their energy fighting the other sects within the "same" religion. It makes even less sense in the case of "atheism" which encompasses many unrelated belief systems. Many have argued that many of the belief system movements ostensibly related to Marxism went on to commit great evil precisely because they became defacto religions complete with bibles (e.g. red books), prophesy and personality cult "Gods". Somehow no matter whatever humanistic goals belief movements start with, very quickly individuals within the movement are able to increase their own power by emphasizing the need to demonize outsiders/ non-believers and to squelch disagreement.
My intent is not to diminish the genocide of the Americas but....
I don't think you realize how many people Stalin, Mao, Hitler have killed. We all know Hitler had to resort to incineration to get rid of the bodies. Stalin filled mines with the remains of Ukrainians and others. They couldn't dig holes big enough to bury the dead. I have no idea what Mao did with the 50-80 million bodies he had on his hands.
Between just these 3 guys your looking at well over 100 million people and that is not including war dead. Just people being exterminated for various reasons.
So to say that nothing beats the genocide of the Americas is not accurate.
The Nazi movement had Christian influence. Whether it influenced the movement in a malicious way is arguable but Nazism wasn't an entirely secular movement.
And to be intellectually honest, none of those you stated committed atrocities in the doctrine of atheism because it has none. Don't throw atheism under the bus when someone criticizes your religion because atheism is the lack of belief in gods, nothing more.
Listen up: I'm not here to pick on atheists. I do have many friends who are and I think I see many who behave more decently than many religious.
It is only when someone mounts sweeping attacks on all or specific religions, based on things that, -while done in name of said religion-, are not described in the sacred texts of said religion, -then I do use the opportunity to gove a little history lesson.
Because if I and other Christians should feel bad because genocide of X, Y and Z then certainly atheists should feel bad because of the reign of terror, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc.
Or rather; not. None of us should. If we should feel bad about anything it is that we aren't doing more now. That certainly bothers me.
As an atheist, why should I feel bad because someone else also lacked a belief in any particular religion? There's no atheist text to follow, no atheist moral guidelines. It's just an absence of belief in religion - there's no shared base there.
Similarly, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot weren't working off some sort of atheist guidebook; atheism was incidental to their 'religion', which was communism. They didn't spread atheism for atheism's sake, they oppressed religious powers because they were competitors for power.
And as the OP said, Christianity today is still used to persecute and oppress. Catholicism still covers up paedophile priests. There are states in the US where an atheist is barred from holding office. Fake 'faith healers' continuously bilk people out of their money. Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
Yes, there are abusive atheists in modern western democracies, but those atheists are not saying things like "women can't hold positions of power" or "ain't no paedophiles here" or similar to protect their atheism.
You're tired of feeling bad because of the dark corners of your religion? I'm tired of the canard of Stalin/Mao/Pot.
A lot of the confusion here has to do with the lack of regulation around the word "Christian". If a genuine evil person is deluded enough to call himself Christian, does that make Christianity responsible for his deeds? When a Muslim murders a club full of gay people or slits the throat of a Catholic priest, does HN upvote a comment that blames Islam?
> Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
The only thing (arguably) Christian mentioned in this thread is this doctrinal issue because it's the only thing supported by some amount of scripture (though good-faith Christians disagree on this particular issue).
> And as the OP said, Christianity today is still used to persecute and oppress. Catholicism still covers up paedophile priests. There are states in the US where an atheist is barred from holding office. Fake 'faith healers' continuously bilk people out of their money. Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
I defend none of it.
Just be so intellectually honest as to admit that Christianity brought a number of good things and Atheists hasn't been without fault and we can meet in the middle.
As I have mentioned before I don't like religious flamewars on HN.
Thats really what I got out this particular segment. Religion to the individual is more important than the political implications. Theres an argument to be made about what the human mind is more likely to latch on to and what is worth having faith in. But here we see that it is a stronger power than those who try to abuse its name. And that in itself is rather beautiful in my opinion
I know how many those people killed. I don't know why you think I don't.
The absolute numbers may well favor the atheists. But there's only one reason for that: those are who the genocidal maniacs happened to be in the 20th century. The next genocidal maniac will probably blow all of those away, regardless of religious beliefs, simply because of the number of people available to kill, and the technology available with which to kill them.
The world population at the time of the Great Leap Forward was 2.4x larger than at the time of the Taiping Rebellion. It was about 6x larger than at the time of the French Wars of Religion and the early phases of the conquest of the Americas, 10x larger than when the Crusades got started, and 15x larger than when the An Lushan Rebellion killed perhaps 5% of all humans on the planet.
It would have been difficult to kill 100 million people during the conquest of the Americas, because that probably would have required millions of immigrants just to bring the population back up to zero afterwards.
In terms of languages lost, cultures destroyed, peoples wiped out, land permanently lost to conquerers, and duration, the Americas "win" by a huge margin.
By the way, do you know why the Atlantic slave trade got started? It's not because Africans made such good slaves. It's because the conquerers of the Americas kept working their native slaves to death and began to run out of natives.
China's population recovered to the level prior to the Great Leap Forward in a few years. I'm not sure of the USSR's population ever significantly dropped, as it was a sort of slow burn that population growth kept up with. Europe's population recovered to pre-WWII levels in a few years. How long did it take the Native American population to recover to pre-contact levels? It's hard to tell, because the pre-contact civilizations were so devastated that there's no good idea of how many people there were, but it's likely that they still haven't recovered, and may never do so.
Still hard to beat 20th century communist atheists in efficiently killing off their own populations or French revolutionaries in being creatively evil.