[kirklancaster]

Originally Posted by Johnnyuk123

The world would be a better place without ANY religion.

Sorry Johnny, but this statement is pure cliched fallacy. So will you please bear with me while I explain just why I say as much?

NON-RELIGIOUS WARS (source: Steve Perry):

1.) The Seven Years’ War (Britain & France)
2.)The American Revolution
3.)The French Revolution
4.)The Napoleonic Wars (France & Europe)
5.)The Revolutions in the Americas
6.)The Wars to create and preserve the British Empire (Boer War, Irish Revolution, and the Great Game with Russia would all be examples)
7.)The American Civil War
8.)The Crimean War
9.)The Spanish-American War
10.)The Great War, The War to End All Wars, or World War I.
11.)The Italian invasion of Ethiopia
12.)The Spanish Civil War
13.)Stalin’s invasions of Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland
14.)World War II
15.)The Chinese Revolution
16.)The Cold War, including but not limited to the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the American intervention in Grenada, and the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan
17.)The Cultural Revolution in China
18.)Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge Revolution
19.)The Falklands War
20.)The Persian Gulf War between Iran & Iraq
21.)The Persian Gulf War between the United Nations and Iraq
The Breakup of Yugoslavia (beginning with Slovenia).

More:

Philip and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopaedia of Wars, is an extensive work which analyses 1,763 wars which have been fought since the beginning of recorded human history, and concludes that only 123 as being religious in nature. This is a mere 6.98% of all wars, but if one removes wars waged in the name of Islam (66), this already low percentage falls by half to just 3.23%.

Irrefutably then, non-religious motivations and secular ideologies are to blame for nearly all wars – not Religion.

But the above only deals with war and the statement was that “The world would be a better place without ANY religion.” So I’ll continue:

What of atrocities, genocide, and other examples of ‘Man’s Inhumanity To Man’ outside of the accepted definition of ‘war’ - as in ‘Dictatorships’?:

From R. J. Rummel’s work ‘Lethal Politics and Death by Government’:.

Non-Religious Dictator Lives Lost
• Joseph Stalin - 42,672,000
• Mao Zedong - 37,828,000
• Adolf Hitler - 20,946,000
• Chiang Kai-shek - 10,214,000
• Vladimir Lenin - 4,017,000
• Hideki Tojo - 3,990,000
• Pol Pot - 2,397,0003

Rummel says: “Almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of a myriad of ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs.”

What of Non-State murders?

Abul Djabar killed 65 men and boys in Afghanistan by strangling them with turbans while raping them and was suspected of over 300 murders.

Javad Iqbal Mughal killed 100 boys Lahore, Pakistan.

Luis Garavo killed 172 children in Colombia but suspected of over 400 murders.

The historical list totals many thousands and include many more familiar names, from Americans such as Gary Ridgeway (90 victims) and Jeffrey Dahmer, to home-grown monsters such as Harold Shipman (up to 297 victims) and Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rose West, and all with not a religious motive in sight.

But hey, let’s not stop here; perhaps our streets and homes would be safer if we rid the world of all religion?

Let’s just look at a couple of statistics from The Office of National Statistics for 2014:

• Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) show that, for the offences it covers, there were an estimated 7.0 million incidents of crime against households and resident adults (aged 16 and over) in England and Wales
• The numbers of rapes (24,043) and other sexual offences (48,934) are the highest recorded by the police since 2002/03.

7 Million Incidents of crime in one year, and this is just ‘reported’ crime.

But would this crime decrease without religion in the world or increase? Here’s why I firmly believe that crime would escalate:

A) Throughout history religion is only to blame for a miniscule percentage of all the atrocities, strife and troubles perpetrated by men against fellow men.
B) Without religion, all instances of ‘Man’s In humanity To Man, and all wars and crimes, would be thousands of times greater, because the simple fact is, that the greater billions of religious faithful throughout recorded history have been peaceful and law abiding specifically because of their religious beliefs – and this includes Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other faiths.

I’ll leave the last words to the much maligned (on here) Jesus Christ:

“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man” (Mark 7:21–23).
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