Throughout mankind's recorded history we see numerous examples of mass
killings and wars resulting in untold millions of deaths and we in the west of
course have seen our fair share of that but we typically associate uh mass killings and jihad
with other religions not with christianity uh of a peaceful religion in in our history surely
and certainly not with religions like buddhism atheism of course just doesn't believe in god so
that ideology is surely not responsible for mass killings on his in history is it well the evidence
is quite surprising and very alarming and i want to share with you some rigorously tested academic
analysis of uh the mass killings in history and i'm going to be drawing on this work war and peace
in islam the uses and abuses of jihad edited by prince ghazi bin mohammed professor ibrahim
kalin and professor mohammed kamali now this is available to read free online and i'll link to it
in the description below and uh chapter seven of this book which i'm going to share with you
is entitled body count a comparative quantitative study of mass killings in history
is very very interesting and the author is dr naveed sheikh and i think this chapter is
based on a a prior academic work and i'm just going to read to you the preamble introduction
and his objectives in this study and then share with you his key findings and analysis
about the death toll distribution uh throughout history or the last two thousand years at least
and which civilizations uh bear the most responsibility for these mass killings
um because we we obviously know it couldn't be christianity a very peaceful religion
certainly couldn't be buddhism very very uh kind and peaceful religion and so on so let's
look at the facts before perhaps we jump to conclusions so in his uh introduction to this
book uh he writes in his seminal work the clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order
published in 1996 harvard political scientist samuel huntington reformulated arnold toynbee's
understanding of history as driven not only by impersonal material structures territory capital
population and natural resources but equally by interpersonal ideational structures ideational
there's a fancy word of saying uh ideas based on ideas and concepts rather than just material
factors in the perhaps marxist sense but equally by interpersonal ideational structures such as
culture identity communal solidarity and civilizational association this perception
seemed supported by empirical observation and soon filled the intellectual and political lycunai
which had attained particular salience in the wake of the collapse of soviet-backed communism
oftentimes the restatement of religion as the single most stable ideational structure in human
history was referred to as the revenge of god as the comeback of religion in our modern world
but for social scientists and historians is in the west alike it became impossible to scientifically
isolated the divine variable from terrestrial imperatives in the muddled socio-political
practices of earthlings that's quite witty i think basically saying that social scientists
and historians can't quite locate the hand of god so to speak in the actual events themselves it's
not a scientific category they can grapple with he continues a casual observation nonetheless
would suggest that discursive constructions about god talk about god in politics shorthand for
absolute truth have been a necessary corollary to nearly all conflictual formulations
from the sub state to the trans state levels the intensity of this linkage and its consistency
is tested in this study now that's quite chunky academic scholarly language what
he's basically saying is you know what is the impact the influence of religion
religion as such in these conflicts uh and other ideologies as well and he describes him more
accessible language in his objective section sections just one short paragraph i want to
share with you because it's much more illuminating than his somewhat obscure introduction he writes
the present study attempts to quantify the human death toll of religious and political violence
throughout the last two millennia and relate these to the religious cultural civilizations adopting
a modified version of huntington's taximony the study progresses along the following lines
firstly a comprehensive data list of over 3000 violent clashes in history from the year dot that
is you know the alleged year of jesus birth and ad0 although we know in fact he was probably born
six bce that's the standard view today but anyway he's gonna compile a list of all violent clashes
in history from jesus's birth to today or in his case 2008 that's when this article was written
we we then proceed to identify 276 of the most violent conflicts in history all with an estimated
death toll of over 10 000 and ranked them by death toll so why 276 well these are the numbers of the
highest death tolls over 10 000 each the result was then organized along civilizational lines
in order to attain a comparative understanding of socio-religiously conditioned violence
the findings are represented in four tables leading to a comprehensive sorry a comparative
evaluation of violence in different religious and civilizational traditions
so perhaps in simpler language you know which civilizations which ideologies which
religions are responsible for how many deaths in recorded history at least the last 2 000 years
and obviously the vast majority of human beings have ever lived have lived in the last 2 000 years
so that sets up the stage now what he does then um he looks at oh before we go to the actual data
in a second um he lists seven civilizations as he calls them and um and defines them so he has one
civilization called the atheist civilization and he says that is located in the communist bloc and
obviously it doesn't exist anymore certainly not in europe but perhaps exists in china north korea
so there's a anti-theist civilization so what deaths are they responsible for in history
the next civilization is the buddhist civilization located in he says in east asia parts of south
asia and then the christian civilization in europe the americas and parts of africa the
indic civilization this is found in india nepal and mauritius the islamic civilization found not
surprisingly in the middle east parts of asia and parts of africa the primal indigenous civilization
which is in parts of africa and the americas before colonization and lastly the synagogue
or cynic civilization which of course is found in china and some neighboring states so these
are the seven civilizations that he's looking at where they're located and he's going to see uh
how many mass deaths in war uh each civilization is responsible for according to the statistics
so in this book um that's kind of it we're going to go to the conclusions now but i'll just show
you and you can see this below for yourself you click on the link um he then goes into pages and
pages and pages of table after table of war wars listed chronologically by numbers so for example
the first event he uh the first event there in the table is world war ii 1939-1945 of course
estimated death toll between 55 and 72 million human beings event type war obviously and
belligerent civilization he's got christian and buddhist okay not sure why he's got buddhists
there but he has and then the next one people's republic of china um and the estimated death toll
for theirs between 44 and 77 million um and the belligerent civilization he's put anti-theist
because obviously the people's republic is a communist state and they're anti-religious they
close down churches persecuted christians jews and muslims and others and they're still doing that
today of course so without going through all of these because there's pages and pages and pages of
of uh by war he means not just war between countries but civil wars
of course as well um they cause a huge number of deaths so what are the results of his survey
interpreting the results so these are the results here on the page but i've just come
to his interpretation of the results our findings show that using the entire data set for the period
year zero jesus birthday basically to 2008 when he wrote this for two thousand years of world history
politically and religiously moted violence has cost between 447 million and 706 million
lives so who's who's the worst offender because we know already that christian civilization is
very peaceful and only seeks to uh christianity is a very peaceful religion we know that atheism
uh is not an ideology that kills people and constantly hear this on twitter and everywhere
how many deaths has atheism cause richard dawkins has asked this question of course common sense
atheism hasn't killed anyone has it um and so on so number one the christian civilization's
share of this is the largest with between 119 and 236 million victims the median is 278 the
median is kind of like halfway so between the highest and the lowest figure the median figure
is 178 million human beings killed in the name of uh christian a result of christian wars
the second place what comes in second place can you guess well it's the anti-theist civilization
which has contributed uh with a median figure of 124 million deaths so 124 million people have died
as a result of atheist wars both civil wars and wars between countries of course
what's third okay is the signing or signing civilization is third with 107 million
deaths that's the median figure the fourth is the buddhist civilization with around 87 million
deaths hang on where's the muslim well surely the muslim civilization must be here somewhere number
five in this unholy list from the very worst the fifth is the primal indigenous civilization with
45 million deaths credited to its civilization number six is the islamic civilization
with 31 million deaths finally seventh and last is the index civilization with just under 2.3 million
deaths so by far away the worst if one looks at the death toll distribution on the pie chart
by far the worst uh cause of mass deaths in wars in civil wars and killings on a mass scale
is the christian civilization in fact those words together don't seem quite right do they
christian and civilization in this context but hey that's that's the language of this survey and
the islamic civilization is this comes second from the bottom in terms of the number of deaths caused
so i think that is uh quite surprising uh certainly was to me when i first read about this
the death toll distribution is so heavily weighted the number one is the christian civilization
number two are the atheists so i'm sorry richard dawkins but atheist states atheists ideology asias
atheist civilizations have been responsible for at least 124 million deaths whether it be the soviet
union whether it be the eastern bloc whether it be china communist china which is probably the
worst one of the worst and most egregious places for killing in history or the world
islam comes six so that's very interesting this book by the way uh the uses uh sorry the uses and
abuses of jihad uh is very interesting because it uh basically debunks many of the uh myths about uh
jihad that we have in the west and is written by um the contents page by a whole team of uh
distinguished scholars um on the subject it talks about warfare in the quran the quran and combat
jihad and the islamic law of war about which is much misunderstanding particularly in the west
um and so on uh i won't go through all the chapters but there are 16 chapters uh on this
subject one piece in islam and i do recommend it you can read it for free online till next time