Christian killed every 5 minutes

GODOLLO, Hungary — It happens every five minutes.

On average, a Christian is martyred every five minutes — killed because of their faith.

Zenit.org and CatholicCulture.org reported on a presentation by Massimo Introvigne of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that he gave in this summer at the "International Conference on Inter-religious dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims."

Introvigne told the conference gathered near Budapest the number of Christians killed every year for their faith is about 105,000. And these are only those who were put to death because they were Christians. It does not include those killed as victims of war.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700175766/Christian-killed-every-5-minutes.html?s_cid=rss-32

charts! Hindus must have trouble and Buddhists are definitely an endangered group.

that would be many more than Christians...

"Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you."

Somehow that's not the vibe I'm getting from the article.

:shrug:

Can't we get some positive statistics for comparison? How many Christians don't get killed while telling others they're sinners while evangelizing? Or perhaps as a ratio, the number of evangelizing contacts with strangers made per Christian killed?

or the UK (unless of course you count all the Catholics and Protestants killed by *each other* during the Troubles in Northern Ireland).

But there are some places where Christians are a minority group, and subject to the dangers associated with that.

Uh-oh. :hide:

(Sorry, just my twisted sense of humor.)

:evilgrin:

I am sceptical about the numbers claimed for Christians killed by atheists *just* because they were Christian; I suspect many were killed by Soviet governments mainly for being dissidents against the regime. However, it is true religious minorities, including Christians in many places, are not well treated by authoritarian regimes.

I call BS on most of that.

The idea that Christians get persecuted more than other minorities is false, but so is the idea that they don't get persecuted at all.

Then again, most drug abusers don't die from drugs but things like car crashes and falls or violence. You have to separate out proximate and distal causes.

In Pakistan, there are a lot of Xians killed. Why? Because they're uppity and demand the same rights as Muslims; or because they don't submit properly to Muslims.

They might be denied permission to build a church year after year, the local mosque saying it would hurt the sensitivities of Muslims, then just build it. The result is violence and dead Xians. Why? Because they illegally built a church. Why was it illegal? Because it was a Xian church and not a mosque.

A girl might be killed for blasphemy. Her crime? Saying Jesus was God. Maybe she did say it, but the accusation might result from her rebuffing a Muslim man's sexual advances. Was she killed for her Xianity or her rejection of the Muslim? Both. Had she been Muslim, neither would have been an issue: Xians are deemed inferior, and the view isn't that much different from how blacks were looked at in the 1870s in the US.

A father might be killed for blasphemy because he refused to let a Muslim marry his daughter. Not much defense against blasphemy: In the appropriate court, the Muslim's word's worth more.

In other countries it's similar, just change out the religion. Muslims are probably the worst offender now for a few different reasons, most of which go back to greater empowerment, education, and wealth on the part both of downtrodden Muslims and downtrodden Xians.

There do not seem to have been any judicial executions on conviction of blasphemy in Pakistan, though some charged have been murdered.

In recent years, it is likely more Shia Moslems than Christians have been killed on religious grounds in Pakistan, as Shia are frequently targeted by Taliban types,who regard them as heretics, and bomb their mosques.

Why did some of the "christians" die? Were they acting outside their faith such as pedophiles? Were they in your face demanding the person be saved?

The data is so lacking. Doesn't have it broke down by geography. The data is one collected from shortly after the start of the church.

I agree with you on the Soviet Union connection.

I'm wondering if this study is partly for the purpose of receiving more sympathy than what happened with the Holocaust and other Jewish sufferings?

Why don't you point precisely to its error?

Industrial-grade nonesense.

The claim forty-five millions were killed solely because they were Christians in the twentieth century is nonsense. That figure is about the most expansive total claimed for total killings in the Soviet Union, very few of which were carried out over religious belief alone. Christians were damned thin on the ground in China during the time of Mao, which removes the remainder of the standard reservoir for scores of millions. Hitler, similarly, killed very few Christians solely for being Christians. One is therefore driven to hunt among side-shows and obscure entries in the race for the title of worst mass-murder in recent history, and these simply do not pack the necessary heft in numbers to sustain the claim. In short, this is self-pitying drivel, compiled by a method of deliberate distortion and exaggeration. Given that the standard figure for total deaths in the Second World War is on the order of sixty millions, the total given would, if true, certainly have shouldered its way to the fore of world consciousness, and not be the sole preserve of ultra-religious journals serving a highly specialized audience. But of course, it is only that specialized audience that wants to believe this sort of swill....

what? "The claim forty-five millions were killed solely because they were Christians in the twentieth century is nonsense. That figure is about the most expansive total claimed for total killings in the Soviet Union, very few of which were carried out over religious belief alone. Christians were damned thin on the ground in China during the time of Mao, which removes the remainder of the standard reservoir for scores of millions."

The fact is that all religious symbolism and practices, along with open adherents were designated targets. Were they the only targets? No. Nonetheless, elimination of religion was a priority.

And no one document any great numbers of persons killed in the Soviet Union solely over their being believing believing Christians. You know that perfectly well, though you will continue to pretend otherwise.

Your line here is a reaction to statement of a fact, variously phrased, that religion has been the motive for the killing of a great many people down the course of human history. Being a religious person, and one who conflates 'religion' with 'good and moral', this troubles you, particularly when it is stated by persons who do not believe there is any Deity, and that all religion is therefore fraud and lies. So you attempt to throw the charge back at them, and claim atheism is the motive for mass murder on a scale that dwarfs killing done from religious motives. In doing this, you engage in a variety of distortions of meaning and shadings of fact. They are pretty obvious, but worth stating openly, as you persist in them so energetically; room must be left for the possibility you really are not aware of what you are doing.

When people say religion has been the motive for killing a great many people, they do not mean that people who hold religious beliefs have killed a great many people, from whatever motive: that would be a wholly unremarkable observation, and hardly worth the typing out. They mean that people have killed other people from motives of religious belief, killed to suppress a dissident sect in their society, or to extend the range of dominion their religion exercises, or killed to enforce a code of behavior inherent to their religion, or killed as matter of religious ritual or rite. And in fact a tremendous number of people have been killed down the course of human history over these directly religious motivations. These are killings which, it could be fairly claimed, would not have taken place without religion, or more precisely, without the religious beliefs the killers felt directed them to kill others as a matter of sacred duty.

When you say in response, 'well, atheists have killed lots and lots of people,' you fail absolutely to tie this into any element of atheist doctrine or belief that requires such killing, and so do not actually mirror the statement you are attempting to defend against, that religion has been the motive for a great deal of killing, that a great deal of killing has owed to the killers subscribing to a religious belief the killing they engaged in was required by their Deity, by their holy law. Since there really is no 'doctrine' of atheism beyond the statement that there is no Deity, it is hard to see how you could tie killings by atheists into some atheist doctrine, in the way that, say, the persecution of heretics or wars of conversion can be tied directly to items of religious doctrine, or the killing of persons on a high altar by priests, or in funerary rites, can be tied directly to requirements of religious ritual or enforcement of a sacred code.

Adopting the standard you wish to apply to killing by atheists, you would have to accept that every killing throughout human history by a person who held a religious belief was a killing that should be charged up to the account of religion, and that it would owe to religion, regardless of its actual motivation. This would chalk just about every death from human agency since we first appeared as a species to the account of religion; indeed, it would include a great many of the killings you ascribe to atheism on religion's side of the ledger, since the actual agents of death, the guards in the camps, the personnel of the squads that carted away the grain, were as a matter of practical fact shot through with persons who retained religious beliefs; even if they were acting on the order of an atheist, they were the ones actually doing the killing, after all.

"It really didn't happen that way." The fact remains that in the USSR and China, etc., state atheism was declared, and religion was very much the proscribed target. There was even a five-year plan to make sure the job was accomplished. When thousands of religious structures were destroyed or converted to state uses and people who frequented those places were imprisoned or executed on the spot, it can be safely said that religious association was the motive.

The dose will be repeated as indicated by eruption of the symptoms, assuming my attention is not taken up by something of greater interest, such as watching paint dry....

Understand, no one expects you to reform, and certainly no one expects to change your mind, but there is some value in laying bare for others what you do.

The spin you choose to put on it is yours alone.

"Children make the best opponents at Scrabble, as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat."

to watch you so thoroughly eviscerate an attempt at argument.

And those of non-Christian religions, notably Jews?

I don't approve of state imposition of *any* belief system, including atheism. The state should not be in the business of telling people what to believe, and penalizing 'thoughtcrime'. And Stalin was a particularly vicious dictator; and Soviet politics in general was pretty nasty.

Nonetheless, your figures here would suggest that *all* or *most* victims of persecutions in the Soviet Union were Christians murdered in the name of atheism; and this is simply not the case.

He brandishes a few isolated facts, like the existence of a militant atheist league in Stalin's Soviet Union, to serve for proof of this, ignoring others, like Stalin's re-establishment of the Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War, and generally commenting without displaying the slightest awareness of events as a whole. It is a pitiful display, though pressed energetically enough that it is hard to maintain any of the more merciful emotions regarding it....

have I stated that "Destroying Religion Was the Sole Aim Of Communism." And by your trite references to the League of Militant Atheists and Stalin's "re-establishment of the Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War", I can see that your knowledge of Soviet history apparently lacks any depth.

The League of Militant Atheists comprised workers, peasants, students, and members of the intelligentsia. Organizations were founded at plants, factories, kolkhozes, and educational institutions. By early 1941, the league consisted of approximately 3.5 million working people of 100 nationalities. The number of groups reached 96,000. Guided by Leninist principles of antireligious propaganda and by the party’s decisions on these principles, the league dedicated itself to ideological struggle against all forms of religion and the development of a scientific world view among working people. It disseminated propaganda on the natural sciences and atheism, offered believers individual counseling, and trained propagandists and atheist agitators. It also published scientific and popular scientific works and a number of periodicals, founded museums and organized exhibitions, and conducted scientific research in the field of atheism and criticism of religion. Working under the motto “The struggle against religion is a struggle for socialism,” the league coordinated atheist propaganda with economic, political, and cultural tasks. The league maintained extensive international ties; it belonged to the International of Proletarian Freethinkers, and then to the World Union of Freethinkers. In 1947 the league turned over its tasks of disseminating scientific-atheist propaganda to Znanie (Knowledge), a newly created all-Union society.
REFERENCES
Konovalov, B. N. “Soiuz voinstvuiushchikh bezbozhnikov.” In the collection Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma, no. 4. Moscow, 1967.
Konovalov, B. N. K massovomu ateizmu. Moscow, 1974.
Concerning "Stalin's re-establishment of the Orthodox Church during the Great Patriotic War", he had little choice if he was to get the population united against a common Nazi enemy. After the war it was back to business and the repression increased dramatically under Khrushchev.

It is not a main thrust of the Party, as revealed by the slogan you cite, 'the struggle against religion is the struggle for Socialism'. People who speak English understand that this means the first item is but one tool employed towards attained the second item, which is the goal of all efforts. The purpose of Communism was a complete re-ordering of economic relations, which by doctrine necessarily would entail a change in all social, even personal, relations. Religion was considered, and with some justice in context, to be one of the principal props of the old social order, and to be engaged, where organized, in active opposition to the Communist project. Every comment of yours on this matter attempts to ignore completely the totality of the matter, and to give outlandishly overstated weight to your personal hobby-horse.

In fact,you have frequently stated, and more often implied, that establishment of atheism was the chief goal of Communism, the goal towards which all actions,particularly all killing, was aimed. This is your 'shtick' here, and everyone knows it. It is about all you do, except for a sideline in claiming you have a means of gaining transcendent knowledge of the universe that is unavailable to those who rule out the existence of the supernatural.

A person who claims repression under Krushchev was greatly increased over repression under Stalin pretty much declares their incapacity to comment sensibly on the subject.

"In fact,you have frequently stated, and more often implied, that establishment of atheism was the chief goal of Communism" - what a crock! You would be telling the truth if you said that it was 'A' "chief goal of Communism", which it was, but NOT THE chief goal.

And as for, "A person who claims repression under Krushchev was greatly increased over repression under Stalin pretty much declares their incapacity to comment sensibly on the subject."- you have no concept of what you are talking about.

"The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 forced Stalin to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to arouse Russian patriotism against foreign aggression. Religious life revived within the Russian Orthodox Church. Thousands of churches were reopened and multiplied to 22,000 before Khrushchev came to power.
The regime's policy of cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church was reversed by Nikita Khrushchev. Although the church remained officially sanctioned, in 1959 Khrushchev launched an antireligions campaign that was continued in a less stringent manner by his successor. By 1975 the number of operating Russian Orthodox churches was reduced to 7,000. Some of the most prominent members of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and activists were jailed or forced to leave the church. Their place was taken by a docile clergy who were obedient to the state and who were sometimes infiltrated by KGB agents, making the Russian Orthodox Church useful to the regime."

The Atheist’s Handbook was published in Moscow in 1959 in conjunction with Khrushchev’s campaign to eliminate the remaining traces of religion in the U.S.S.R. In 1955, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said, “Communism has not changed its attitude of opposition to religion. We are doing everything we can to eliminate the bewitching power of the opium of religion.”

Nikita Khrushchev, speech, September 22, 1955, quoted in Bales, Communism, 165–6.

The Atheist’s Handbook, , (Moscow, USSR: Gos. Izd. Politicheskoi Literatury, 1961), reproduced in English by U.S. Joint Publications Research Service (Washington, DC), 117.

Every history of the Soviet Union agrees on this. The Twentieth Congress speech repudiated a mild regime and announced a reign of terror unparalleled in Russian history since Ivan the Terrible.

The index of repression, as most people understand it, is in the harm done to those who are its target. People lost jobs or drew moderate terms under Krushchev. He saw to it the Party and the state kept control of the Church,as it did of all institutions in society. The number of believers certainly declined,as many fewer persons had been brought up under religious instruction.

the problem is you insist on presenting attitudes towards religion as something unique and special under Communist rule; it was not. What do you think happened to property owners, to aristocrats, to military officers, to any institution that offered a possible parallel to the state?

Active oppression of religion was curtailed after the war, in stark contrast to Stalin's actions before WWII. However, one of Khrushchev's major complaints about Stalin is that he became too lax on the influence of religion, and Khrushchev renewed efforts to eliminate the effects of religion upon society altogether.

You are only embarrassing yourself. Till now, you might have passed for someone who did a high school history course at an only slightly retrograde school,but you are making evn that courteous assumption difficult to sustain now.

I have pretty much been able to back up what I have said so far. You in turn seem to be making it up as you go along. What exactly is it that you think is so outlandish?

That requires me to decide whether it is worth my time to educate you, or simply leave the demonstration as it lies now. Your commentary makes the concept of tunnel-vision look like a wide-angled lens by comparison.

By no means is it universal. At first, I thought you were being facetious, but now realize that you are serious. Just how do you measure "worse"? Is it in the number of people killed? Because Stalin certainly wins in that category. Each Communist leader among the group of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev was faced with their own unique problems in different eras of the nation's development. Considering only religion, between Lenin and Stalin, organized religion was eliminated as a major influence in the affairs of government. Those were by far, the bloodiest years for religious adherents. Religion did enjoy a relative respite after WWII. Under Khruschev, religion was again heavily repressed and an attempt was indeed made to eliminate it completely by executions, imprisonments, and by razing religious structures. But to say that those times were more oppressive than under Stalin is a stretch. When Lenin came to power Russia was only a half century removed from serfdom. When Khruschev came to power the USSR was a superpower. The fact is that all three tolerated religion only so far as it facilitated their objectives. Beyond that, they had no use for it.

to the matter at hand, I can see that you don't possess enough knowledge to justify any further discussion.

"I detest flattery,especially the kind you have to work hard to believe."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec0clERjQ5A

in the last century. I have never stated otherwise, nor have I ever stated "that *all* or *most* victims of persecutions in the Soviet Union were Christians murdered in the name of atheism."

And that is a claim that most, even a claim that nearly all, victims of Communist governments were killed over religious belief, as part of the practice of atheism. It is one of your major 'contributions' to this forum.

to say that the numbers of religious killings did go into the millions, when the total numbers of mass killings in Russia, China, etc., exceeded 100 M.

People were not imprisoned or killed in the purges because they dissented from the Communist government, because they opposed it or expressed disagreement with Communism in some way. There are a handful this was true of, mostly artists who did not know how to keep their mouths shut, but not much more.

The most dangerous thing to be in Soviet Russia during the Purges was a Communist Party member; Party members had a much higher chance of ending up personally in cells than people who were not Party members, and the higher one's rank in the Party, the greater one's risk of being arrested, and if arrested,of being shot. These arrests owed mostly to someone higher-up (with the highest being Stalin and a small clique around him) thinking you had got too big for your britches,were too popular, even too good at your work. Anything which might be taken as indicating potential to be a threat,within the Communist system, to its present chiefs.

The great bulk of arrests were for nothing at all; they were trumped up to meet quotas. Party police were assigned numbers of arrests they had to meet, which were larger in spring, after the winter die-offs,and if they did not make production targets, filled the cells themselves. Arrests were for trifles, by any reasonable standard; for being late at work, for making a purchase on the black market, for being heard (or reported to have been heard by an informer) making some complaint, or statement that could be viewed as a double entendre, or as defeatist, or some such thing. The purpose was to provide labor for a variety of gigantic projects intended to exploit natural resources and develop heavy industry at a rapid page.

The large episodes of killing had even less to do with what any individual might or might not have thought or said or done. The starving of the Ukraine, for instance, was at bottom a brutal exercise in subduing a colony, in breaking the social leadership of the place, and inflicting such suffering on the people that they would be tractable in future. Collectivization was the tool, and was a desired outcome, but there was more to it than that. The Ukraine more or less made a decent bid to escape the Russian Empire during the Civil War, with some major armed bodies committed to fighting both Reds and Whites, and even Germans and Poles on occasion:the region, however, was too large a portion of the Empire's resources to be allowed to depart. The continuity between Czarist and Soviet policy, in such matters, is striking....

When you show signs of dealing with the nature of the events, we can proceed to deal with your exaggerated sense of numbers, in all categories....at least if my interest holds....

"If a man will continue to insist two and two do not make four, I know of nothing in the power of argument to stop up his mouth."

Do you include people such as Trotsky, Solzhenitsyn, Bukharin, etc.? Hardly dissident artists. And I would have to question your understand of dissidents and purges. In just a two year period, in one purge, hundreds of thousands of dissidents died.

"The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions."

"The purge was motivated by the desire on the part of the leadership to remove dissenters from the Party and what is often considered to have been a desire to consolidate the authority of Joseph Stalin. Additional campaigns of repression were carried out against national minorities and social groups which were accused of acting against the Soviet state and the politics of the Communist Party."

"Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of various political crimes (espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups) and then executed by shooting, or sent to the Gulag labor camps. Many died at the penal labor camps due to starvation, disease, exposure, and overwork. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis. One secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van."

They engaged in a power struggle with Stalin, and lost. Bukharin supported Stalin in purging Trotsky, then was chopped himself. None of this had the slightest thing to do with dissent from Communism. Sohlzenitzen was at the time of his arrest an army officer; his writing,and even much of his political consciousness, came later.

Your little primer excerpt demonstrates nothing but your lack of understanding o0f the true scale and monstrosity of the events.

But they were most certainly dissidents within Communism. And I certainly never said that Sohlzenitzen was engaged in any form of dissent during the Stalin years. But he was nonetheless an extremely influential dissident, as I am sure you undoubtedly know from reading 'The Gulag Archipelago', which of course concerns much that I have been talking about. But I think you knew that already. As far as my "lack of understanding o0f the true scale and monstrosity of the events", I am not the one who keeps denying that so much of what actually occurred never happened. The state policy of "Scientific Atheism" was inculcated in EVERY school, factory, government facility, and every city and town across the Soviet Union.

It is also reasonably clear you do not have the slightest interest in learning more....

Solzhenitsyn did become a Christian, but it was *after* he had been imprisoned and threatened with death by the regime; possibly a result of his rejection by and of the Communists -not the original cause of his persecution.

Trotsky and Bukharin were lifelong atheists; and Trotsky was ethnically Jewish, so had essentially no connection with Christianity.

For the rest, your description is perfectly true, but it refers to persecution of people seen as anti-Communist, or even more commonly, as heretics within the Communist Party. With the addition of quite a few people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Christians *were* one of the social groups seen as a threat to the regime; but there were many, many other dissidents who were also murdered, or at best imprisoned or exiled.

This is *real* persecution of Christians, which makes it even more revolting when people cry 'persecution' whenever they are prevented from discriminating against gays, for example.

A few depressing examples of such viciousness toward Christian minorities:


http://livewire.amnesty.org/2010/11/30/%e2%80%98blasphemy%e2%80%99-death-sentence-controversy-another-wakeup-call-for-pakistan-government/

http://lifeofapakistanichristian.blogspot.com/

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE12/001/2010/en/702db4a9-5123-4d26-bccb-b46bcd1b190b/mde120012010en.html

Mmmmmmmmaybe I'm wrong, but this sure looks like something sent out to entice someone, anyone, to make a comment against "Christians" that can be used all over the internets and th' librul media to PROVE beyond all doubt that th' EEEEEEEVIL libruls that hang out here are as hate-filled as the Loving Christians™.

Someone dies every second. Someone (else) is born every second. Sky is up, dirt is down.

(held 1-3 June, 2011 Gödöllő) doesn't list Massimo Introvigne as affiliated with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe but lists him as Director of the
Center for Studies on New Religions; so there could be some pretty sloppy reporting here

Here's the CESNUR webpage: http://www.cesnur.org/

Don't know nuthin about em but looks interesting on first impression

Seems to think too much is made of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church, too.

PERSONALITY AND RELIGIOUSNESS IN THE FAMILY
Presented on October 21, 2000
Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and Religious Research Association
Doubletree Post Oak Hotel
Houston, Texas
http://www.cesnur.org/2001/thefamily.htm

THE FAMILY IN TRANSITION: THE MORAL CAREER OF A NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT
by Gordon Shepherd, The University of Central Arkansas Department of Sociology; and Gary Shepherd, Oakland University Department of Sociology and Anthropology
A paper Presented at the 2002 CESNUR Conference, Salt Lake City, June 25, 2002 - Preliminary draft: do not reproduce or quote without the consent of the authors
http://www.cesnur.org/2002/slc/sheperd.htm

might just be studying "new religions". gotta link?

http://www.uca.edu/sociology/facultystaff/gordons.php

he seems to be a sociology professor with an interest in The Family
perhaps Shepherd is doing real research?

My knowledge of it is personal, and you will forgive me for ceasing to comment on the particular subject, so as not to put too great a strain on my calm demeanor....

Deseret News? Seriously?

They're the most "persecuted" of them all!

:rofl:

Edit to add: This article is telling -- http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700175934/A-religious-test.html

of an old SNL skit. The TV news reporter says something like, "Every 5 seconds, a man is mugged in NYC. Here is that man." Video shows the same man being assaulted every 5 seconds.

How many individual Christians are actually being martyred - and just because they're Christians?

Human rights violations are very common around the world, but one can do nothing with statistical estimates: one needs specific information about current specific cases

I checked the link upthread for Massimo Introvigne's sources for the estimate: he claims he got various from a couple of cited texts but really provides very little info

I consider the Magistrate's skepticism at the numbers quite justified. If one really had 105K Christians murdered each year for purely religious reasons, that's a rate of 1.5 per 100K world population per year. Going through the lists of the most populated countries that works out to be about: 20K in China, 18K in India, 4K+ in the US, 3K+ in Indonesia ... If one begins lowering estimates for the most populated countries, the rate elsewhere must increase

Introvigne points vaguely at the Sudan. Of course, the civil war there was quite destructive, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of casualities, many by disease and famine -- but Introvigne also claims the estimates don't include war casualities

That's assuming his figures are accurate. Obviously murder is wrong and killing someone because of a religious difference of opinion is always wrong. As with all hate crimes, it should never happen. But human nature being what it is, it always will happen. Out of more than seven billion people globally, 105,000 isn't very many. It's about twice as many as are killed by auto accidents in the USA alone.

Anyway, rug, as a proponent of religion, doesn't this kind of cut against your argument? This is hatred and violence motivated solely by a religious difference of opinion. Maybe without the religious hatred they would murder over something else, but just as likely they would not. Obviously this matter has little bearing on whether or not god is real (except for the whole theodicy thing). But it does suggest that religion can be harmful.

I noted that in the body of my previous post. I wrote it again here so it would be in the subject line to underscore the point.

the needless loss of life is bad enough but to think of ALL THOSE (whatever the actual number may be) people dieing for the sake of exalting some ancient sheppard rantings, debunked myths and illogical hysterics... it's so amazingly PROFOUNDLY sad. It's every bit as tragic as the men and women who die in Iraq, predicated on a lie a KNOWN lie, and it continues still to this very die. Yes the two are the same in my eyes, lies, liars, and the people that die for them.

vitriolic hatred being spewed here. "Karma hurr durr".

It's not right for anyone to be killed. People just ignore the fact that in some areas Christians are STILL being killed for their beliefs.