Wrapper

"badgolferman" <REMOVETHISbadgolferman@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:xn0etz7hv8mr5lk001@news.readfreenews.net...[color=blue]
> 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.
>
> ----------------------------------
>
> [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][/color]

This reminds me of the irony of Madelyn Murray O'Hare (Probably the most
famous atheist of all time), being murdered by one of her own 'followers'

Natalie