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Here is an interesting article pointing out the hypocrisy of today's
secularists when they try to claim that religion is responsible for
more deaths throughout time and that if God was removed from the social
psyche their would be no mass violence today. He claims atheism is the
root of hatred towards the fellow man and has been responsible for far
more deaths overall.

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[excerpts]

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures
rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than
500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition
appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional
100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much
lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the
death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In
the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf
Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass
slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these
atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

Moreover, many of the conflicts that are counted as "religious wars"
were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival
claims to territory and power. Can the wars between England and France
be called religious wars because the English were Protestants and the
French were Catholics? Hardly.

The same is true today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its
core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over
self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in
Israel may advance theological claims - "God gave us this land" and so
forth - but the conflict would remain essentially the same even without
these religious motives. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of
the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20061121/cm_csm/ydsouza[/url]