The other day, I heard for about the 1,000,000th time that "more people have been killed by religion than by anything else", with the usual citation of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. I will not presume to undertake a comprehensive review of history here, particularly when it comes to comparing the death toll attributable to all of the world's religions. But since these two examples are so often cited, I decided to look into the number of casualties resulting from these two tragic events.
Records are not very good from these periods, so exact numbers are hard to come by. However, estimated casualties from the Crusades number around 200,000 over the space of about 200 years. The number of people killed in the Inquisition are estimated to range between 3,000 and 5,000.
Communism, noted for its elevation of atheism as the "state religion", is believed to be responsible for the deaths of a minimum of 40 million people between 1900-1987.
I'm just saying....
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