It used to be C.S. Lewis. Then Josh McDowell. Then Lee Strobel. Now it’s Timothy Keller, whose The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (published in 2008) is the number one most read defense of Christianity. So here’s why it’s bunk.
I’ll survey Keller’s book in several parts. Here I’ll cover everything through the end of Chapter Two, which sets the ground for the rest of the book.
- A Foundation of Lies
- The Leap of Doubt
- The Secularization Thesis
- Cultural Relativism
- Secular Government
- Lying about History
- Summary
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Christianity Rests on a Foundation of Lies
Keller is a typical Christian apologist. Which means, he’s a liar. I’ve already refuted pretty much all his arguments in my article on Bayesian Counter-Apologetics, just by being honest: I reintroduce all the evidence he deliberately ignores and goes out of his way not to tell any of his readers about; then I re-run the math with that omitted evidence. The end result: every argument he makes for God, is actually an argument against God. I’ll point out more specific lies he tells as I proceed through the principal points of his book. But the overall tactic is simply to conceal, and in such a way that with the right evidence left out, it looks like there’s a god.
Of course, there are also plenty of fallacies. But even those are lies. Regular Christians can fallacy their way into believing all manner of false things without even realizing they are doing that. But Keller’s deployment of fallacies is sometimes so calculated, I can only conclude he knows he is manipulating his readers.
I’ll point out specific examples of that as well. But right out of the gate, Keller structures his entire book around one fallacy that is surely an intentional deception (because someone of his knowledge and experience cannot possibly not know this): in his introduction Keller launches the rhetorical device of claiming that “in fairness you must doubt your doubts,” and if you doubt your doubts, you should stop doubting. What he doesn’t tell the reader is that doubting your doubts, does not actually warrant believing anything. Because in most cases, the conclusion you reach is that you don’t know what’s true. Doubting every explanation there is, does not produce any reason to pick one to believe in. To the contrary, it warrants believing none of them.
Keller says “we will have to base our life on some answer” to the question of whether a god exists and what religion is true (p. 10), but that’s not really the case. We may have to base our life on the fact that we don’t know the answer to either question. “I don’t know, therefore I have to pick one” is illogical. Of course, though he pretends that isn’t an option, it’s only the worse that, in fact, the evidence is overwhelming that there is no god and no religion is true. But someone has to honestly examine the evidence, and thus actually know about that evidence, before they can discover that; and Keller has engineered his book to prevent that. But even by not telling the reader about the “picking nothing because you don’t know” option, Keller gets to trick the reader into picking—and since his book is actually intended for Christians and not skeptics, he knows it’s foregone which they’ll pick.
But really, Keller is never going to examine anything there is any genuine basis for “doubting your doubts” over. In other words, he will never pick something we actually should profess ignorance over, like what the underlying cause was of the inflationary Big Bang, or why there are only three dimensions of space and not ten billion, or why quarks exist and have the properties they do, or exactly which mechanism produced the first self-replicating molecules on earth. He’s going to instead pick stuff where there actually is ample evidence for doubting his explanation; and then not tell you about any of that evidence. Worse, he’s going to tell you there isn’t any. So he doesn’t just lie to you by omission; he straight up lies to you.
This is Christianity. And this alone is sufficient reason to be certain it’s a false religion. Because no true one would need any such tactics to defend it.
A really good example of this dishonest manipulation is already afforded by his own introductory example of what he supposedly means:
When Jesus confronted “doubting Thomas” he challenged him not to acquiesce in doubt (“believe!”) and yet responded to his request for more evidence. In another incident, Jesus meets a man who confesses that he is filled with doubts (Mark 9:24), who says to Jesus, “Help thou my unbelief”—help me with my doubts! In response to this honest admission, Jesus blesses him and heals his son.
What is omitted here? The fact that this never really happens. It only happens in a mythical tale written by an unknown person working from unknown sources (if even they had any). If it were sensible for Jesus to give evidence to us as he did to Thomas and a demon-possessed boy’s father in Mark, he’d be giving that evidence to us. And we’d have no need of Keller’s books. It’s precisely the fact that what happens in the Gospels never happens for anyone in real life that we know Jesus is fake.
You can’t doubt this doubt. Because the evidence of Jesus never doing for us what he did for Thomas, is overwhelming almost to the point of outright undeniability. If Jesus flies down from outer space and lets me fondle his wounds, and shows me actual demons coming out of epileptic kids, then we can start having a conversation about what this evidence means. But there isn’t even any such evidence to discuss. Pointing to made up stories, only reminds us of the fact that the world never works like that. It only reminds us that those stories do not reflect reality. Which is why we don’t believe them. Nor ever should.
Keller tries conning his readers by skipping over all of that and making it seem like Jesus is this totally great evidence-producer, because “look!”, a mythical text says he gave someone else amazing evidence, so surely he must have actually done that. Even though we don’t get to hear this from that someone else. Or anyone who was even there. But it’s worse than that even. Because for Keller’s own logic to work, Jesus needs to give that evidence to us. Not to imaginary people in ancient fables. There are no demons possessing kids. There are no walking, talking, teleporting corpses with open wounds to fondle.
Even if we are charitable and assume Keller has lied to himself this whole way through, his whole book could honestly have been subtitled How I Avoid Thinking about All the Reasons My Beliefs Are False. Because every argument in it, is just a rationalization for ignoring the evidence someone just presented against him, rather than actually confronting it. And like all delusional belief systems, he crafts the rationalization so that it sounds like it has ended the argument. As long as you don’t question it. The moment you start asking if what he just said even makes sense, everything falls apart.
The Imaginary Leap of Doubt
This means Keller tries to counter the “leap of faith” trope by claiming doubters are just making a “leap of doubt.” Which gets the logic of evidence backwards. You don’t have to leap to doubt. Doubt is where you are already standing. Because most things are false. You don’t have to leap to where you already are. You need to leap to believe something…and even then only if you are going to believe it without, or even worse, against the evidence. If you’ve got evidence, you don’t need faith. You don’t have to leap; you get to walk, straight across a sturdy bridge of evidence. You don’t need faith as a reason to believe anything, if you commit to believing things only in proportion to the evidence for them. That’s not believing on faith. That’s believing on reason.
Ignoring that, Keller starts his con by claiming what people find the most troubling about Christianity is its exclusivity. So he then spends pages arguing that true things have to be exclusive. Which is fine. Except, that’s not what any of those people mean. He is thus refuting a fake argument he just made up, and making it look like he answered the actual argument people kept presenting him. An honest treatment of this question is in Fighting Words by Hector Avalos, who correctly adduces the “scarce resources” hypothesis of religious rhetoric: religions create a fake scarcity of resources, which people then fight over; and this leads to violence, oppression, cruelty, and injustice. This is what people find appalling about Christianity. Not the idea that only one thing can actually be true.
What are the people Keller is falsely claiming to answer really saying? That they don’t think declaring allegiance to any Christian creed is necessary to be recognized as good and just. Hence creedal schisms are ridiculous. And yet Christianity itself, is just another credeal schism—with Judaism; just as Judaism was just another schism with a primitive Canaanite storm god cult. Keller thus confuses arbitrary beliefs, with what makes a person good and worthy. If a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Humanist are honest and compassionate, good neighbors and citizens, why the fuck does Keller think they are going to hell? Why do they need Jesus at all? Religions routinely condemn good people. That’s why religions suck.
So Keller is already concealing from his readers the real reasons skeptics doubt (which tells you this book isn’t actually written for skeptics; it was written to keep Christians from doubting). And thus he doesn’t answer those actual doubts; he instead answers a fake doubt that no real skeptic actually has. I’ll be fair here and note that he’ll take a stab at the real reason later in the book. I’ll get to that in a subsequent entry in this series. But first he has to snow his readers into thinking skeptics doubt because of this “silly” notion that the truth is too exclusive and “dude, that’s just cramping our style, man!” Because that straw man is easy to tear down.
Example: The Secularization Thesis
Keller’s chosen lie at this point is when he declares the “secularization thesis” is “now largely discredited” (p. 6). But he never explains what that thesis was or how it has evolved over time. What he means has been discredited is the unscientific prediction that religion will disappear in modern secular nations. But that was never a scientific theory. The actual secularization thesis in the actual science of sociology states that “as societies progress, particularly through modernization and rationalization, religion loses its authority in all aspects of social life and governance.” Which is entirely confirmed. Everywhere. Note the emphasis I added in bold. Note how Keller’s “version” of the thesis isn’t that. Misrepresenting what you are talking about, is lying.
Religion—both popular belief, and its influence on public policy and social mores—indeed has so far always declined in proportion to the broadening of prosperity, personal liberty, and social safety nets. Basically, the more you don’t need religion (and are allowed to choose not to have one), the more people stop bothering to have one. That thesis remains solidly confirmed in the data. See Phil Zuckerman’s Society without God and Faith No More (and all the peer reviewed science I cite in The End of Christianity, p. 421, n. 10). Keller plays a shell game, pretending he is telling his readers about the scientific theory, when in fact he is talking about something mistaken for it. And so when he tries to “prove” the theory has been discredited by documenting how much religious growth there has been, all the religious growth he documents is in societies that don’t support their members with social welfare, or effectively regulate crime and corruption, or reduce income disparity. When instead we look at societies that do do those things (the only actual way to test the thesis…proving Keller is a liar, because he well knows what the thesis really is and thus where we really have to look to test it), we see the exact opposite of what he claims: religion is always declining—traditional supernaturalist religion most of all.
This is how Keller lies to his readers. He doesn’t tell them the truth, which would undermine everything he wants to trick the reader into believing. He tells them something else instead, something ridiculous, and then of course easily refutes it. Then pretends he refuted the actual thing. Oh, yes, and you may have noticed, “You should become a Christian because more people in the Third World are becoming Christians,” is an ad populum fallacy. But whatever.
Example: Cultural Relativism
In line with his reliance on straw men, Keller deals with lazy objections like “all religions are equally true” that require no reply here. Obviously that’s dumb. But what he is using this to avoid addressing, is the real objection people mean, when they say what he falsely reinvents as “all religions are equally true.” They don’t mean that. They mean, every religion has a little bit of the truth, not all of it. In other words, no one religion is entirely true. Now, even that can be questioned, but he doesn’t question it legitimately (e.g. surveying religions and asking what they got right and what they got wrong; he couldn’t, because he has no non-circular standard to do that by, since his only “standard” is his version of his religion…as opposed to, say, evidence).
Keller at least tries to dispatch that (correct) version of the argument by confusingly trying to attack the logic of it. Critiquing, in fact, the parable of the elephant and the blind men. In that parable, each blind man handles one part of the elephant and insists it’s a different thing based on which part he is handling: the one handling the trunk says it’s a snake, the one handling a leg says it’s a tree, etc. But of course all are wrong. Each has a part of the truth. But the actual truth requires putting all their information together, and discovering thereby that it’s an elephant. Christianity, critics say, are like the guy at the trunk who refuses to do that, and keeps insisting it’s a snake and everyone else is wrong. That’s a pretty apt critique. Indeed, it is exactly what I demonstrate in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Christianity can only be defended by ignoring evidence.
To this Keller replies, “How could you know that each blind man only sees part of the elephant unless you claim to be able to see the whole elephant?” (p. 9). This is supposed to be an “Aha!” objection. Instead, it’s just stupid. And reveals the stupidity behind all of Christian thinking. The point is that if everyone sees something different, the only possibility is the elephant. Otherwise, they are all insane. Consequently, Keller just played the lunatic: he acted like a crazy person, defending the trunk as a snake, with nothing other than a dumb excuse for ignoring all the other data everyone else collected. In actual fact, no one person has to “see” anything. When you put all the data together, you can reconstruct what it is: an elephant. That’s actually the beauty of evidential reasoning. The marvelous progress of science is based entirely on doing just that. Theology, by contrast, doesn’t.
To see how a not-insane person would use the parable of the elephant correctly in this matter, see my Bayesian analysis of the Argument from Religious Experience. This is what Keller has no rational response to. And what he suspiciously avoids ever telling the reader is the real problem.
The corollary to all this is Keller’s fear of the sociological explanation of religion. That in fact, what religion someone considers to be true, is entirely a product of culturally relative conditions: where you were born and when; or who you accidentally met. The data bear this out. Christianity is mostly in Western nations. Buddhism mostly in Eastern nations. Islam mostly in nations Muslims conquered. Judaism pretty much just spreads within Jewish families. And three thousand years ago, it was none of those things, anywhere, but yet other completely different religions, everywhere. Religion is always an accident. It’s never constructed from evidence, the way science is—which for that reason, unlike religion, has become universal. Every culture adopts its conclusions. Why can’t religion do that? (Without a gun?) Because no religion is actually true. It’s just a contingent cultural product of a given time and place.
Keller doesn’t like this. Science is annoying to Christians, because it discovers things like that. So like all science deniers, he tries to deny the science is valid. He uses here the argument that this notion, the claim that all religions (and therefore Christianity) are just the product of social conditions, “itself is a comprehensive claim about everyone that is the product of social conditions—so it cannot be true, on its own terms” (p. 10). I’m being nice, and making his argument less of a straw man here. In actual fact he converted this claim, into the claim that “no belief can be held as universally true for everyone,” which is not what cultural relativism says. It’s a fake bogeyman Christians invented, because it’s easy to show that statement’s silly. But that’s not the actual statement any scientist makes. Rather than claiming “no” belief is universally true, they claim that religious beliefs are not. Because religious beliefs are grounded in localized cultural assumptions, and not universally replicable evidence.
So Keller wants to avoid this conclusion by claiming it’s circular. But it’s not. There is no logical inconsistency in saying even science is a product of social conditions, yet still is grounded in universally replicable evidence: it is in fact the local cultural conditions that determine whether we respect that fact or not. But once we do, it’s undeniable that that’s the way to get at an objective reality (it’s why science could land us on the moon; not Christianity). Which is why so many cultures get on board with this discovery, and so quickly. No religion has ever been that successful at spreading globally, without the use of bribery or coercion.
But it’s still a matter of social conditions that make it possible for people to care about access to objective evidence; the people who don’t, are culturally predetermined to avoid and deny the results of science. Like Christian fundamentalists. It took a lot of cultural change, over a thousand years of it in fact, before Christians could even accept the values necessary to a successful scientific access to reality (see The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Ancient Greece). That doesn’t mean science is just as false as Christianity. It means cultural and social conditions are still needed to cause anyone to recognize what science can do, and to value that discovery. Which means culture and social conditions can blind you to science. Christians, take note.
The bottom line is, a vast amount of evidence makes clear that Keller’s beliefs are culturally and historically conditioned. Had he been born two thousand years ago, he would not be a Christian. Had he been born in Saudi Arabia, he would almost surely be a Muslim. That our being able to notice that fact is also culturally and historically conditioned, has no bearing on whether it’s nevertheless true, or whether we can know it’s true. Because the reason it’s true, is all that evidence, that religion, unlike scientific and other evidence-based conclusions, is solely a product of cultural conditioning. It has no other basis—as even Keller must admit for every other religion than his. Carving out an exception for Christianity? Nothing more than special pleading. Honestly. See The Outsider Test for Faith, and Chapters 1 and 4 of The Christian Delusion, and Chapter 1 of The End of Christianity.
Example: Secular Government
Keller of course has a political agenda. He needs this book to convince Christians not to explore their doubts, so he can keep them in the fold, so he can use their Christianity to manipulate their votes in controlling society. This is pretty much all Christianity is for among the wealthy elite. Thus, Keller has to attack the principle of separation of church and state…even though that actually has nothing to do with whether Christianity is true, and thus has no logical place in this book. But just as Mark 4:9-12 is the key to understanding that whole Gospel, so this digression is key to understanding the purpose behind Keller’s entire book.
“What is religion then?” Keller asks rhetorically. “It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing” (p. 17). Actually, religion tends to be a belief in the supernatural, or in some collection of unquestionable dictates. Once you have an alterable, evidence-based worldview, those two features disappear. And what you have left, is rarely called a religion. Sure, for legal purposes it is, since civil rights must protect the religious liberty of the atheist as much as the believer, because protecting the freedom to believe cannot prejudge what’s acceptable to believe. As such, philosophy is my religion. But Keller isn’t talking about philosophy. He’s talking about Christianity.
But by defining religion so broadly as to even include godless, un-dogmatic worldviews, Keller gets to play a trick. He gets to claim, now, that “insisting that religious reasoning be excluded from the public square is itself a controversial ‘sectarian’ point of view” (p. 17). As if he has forgotten the hundreds of years of blood and horror that led the Founding Fathers to invent the concept of a secular government in the first place. Not wanting bloodshed, tyranny, and oppression is not “controversial” or “sectarian.” It’s Common Sense. See my chapter on the real reason we purged religion from democracy in Christianity Is Not Great (Chapter 9). But as a précis, you can start with That Christian Nation Nonsense.
Hiding all that from his readers, Keller acts like there was never any reason to do that, and that undoing what the Founding Fathers did is surely a great and sensible idea. Because, you know. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
Keller is again confusing what we can prove with evidence—such as that civil societies that separate church and state, and thereby guarantee religious freedom and neutrality, work better than any scale of theocracy (they experience less oppression, less violence, less tyranny, less poverty)—with just “any belief whatever” about what governments should do. Beliefs without evidence, or contrary to the evidence, are not “equally as good” as evidence-based beliefs. That’s why religion is bad. It takes beliefs based on no evidence, and uses the power of the state to force or cajole the populace to adhere to them. That’s theocracy. And two thousand years of history proves it never leads to anything good. That’s why we got rid of it.
Keller is also confusing private morality—such as whether we should eat pork or marry a gay couple or swat a mosquito because bugs might contain a human soul—with public law—such as outlawing anyone eating pork or marrying gay couples or swatting mosquitoes. This is the evil horror that lurks inside Keller’s politicized Christianity. And it’s why political Christianity is the enemy of the human race. Christians should never have the right or the power to force non-Christians to obey specifically Christian morals or doctrines. For exactly the same reason Muslims never should. Or Jains. Or Hindus. Or any other faith-based construct.
Only evidence-based reasoning should be allowed to dictate state policy. Religious beliefs have exactly zero business there. You are free to not have abortions or not eat bacon or not swat mosquitoes if your chosen religion says so. You are not free to compel anyone else to obey those rules. Nor are you free to take the law into your own hands and punish them for not obeying them.
Example: Lying about History
Christians like to pretend they invented everything. Keller is no exception. In dealing with the objection that Christians are statistically just as awful as the members of every other religion and none—and therefore the evidence shows Christianity has no effect on making people better (so what use is it?)—Keller bites the bullet and admits that we “should expect to find nonbelievers who are much nicer, kinder, wiser, and better than” Christians are, because “Christian believers are not accepted by God because of their moral performance, wisdom, or virtue, but because of Christ’s work on their behalf” (p. 19). Which is clever rigmarole. But doesn’t really address the point. If Christianity has no observable effect, what do we need it for?
This is a problem. So Keller tries to lie his way out of it.
Keller’s tactic now is to claim Christianity did have this great and wonderful effect—on civilization as a whole, you see. So even atheists are benefiting from the things Christianity did for human morals and whatnot. The problem, of course, is that this simply isn’t true. “The early Christians mixed people from different races and classes in ways that seemed scandalous to those around them,” Keller says (p. 20). Except, that idea had already been invented by the pagans before that, and was in fact borrowed by the Christians. The notion of cosmopolitanism, uniting all classes and races (and often even genders) in new fictive kinship groups, was a defining feature of the Mystery Religions, of which Christianity was a derivation. In fact it was a late-comer, the result of the Jews finally coming around and inventing their own Mystery Cult, just as the Egyptians and Syrians and Persians and Thracians had done before them (see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 11, pp. 96-108).
Similarly, Keller falsely claims Christians made the West more charitable and generous. Nope. Even his claim that “Christians cared for the sick and dying” more than pagans did (p. 20) is unsupported by any usable evidence. Only Christian apologists claimed this, and they were notorious liars. No independent evidence those claims are true has ever materialized.
Similarly, Keller falsely claims that “Christianity afforded women much greater security and equality than had previously existed in the ancient classical world” (p. 20). There is no evidence of that, either. To the contrary, as a class, women lost a lot of their rights and independence in the Medieval social system. Canonical Christianity taught that women are forbidden to teach, preach, or have authority over a man (1 Timothy 2:9-15). Let’s not forget. There is a reason Hypatia was murdered. By Christians.
Under Christian tenure, women were regarded as inferior to and subordinate to men. Christians taught nothing like the legal and social liberation of women voiced by their pagan predecessors. Women also certainly lost all their available sexual freedom. But women also could no longer be priests. Divorce became far more difficult. Access to education was greatly curtailed. Positions of authority and intellectual achievement were far less accessible. Their jobs became limited to domestic and “approved” occupations, and “having babies” was almost the only appropriate role imagined for them. Under the guise of “protecting” women, they were placed under the authority of men and restricted in their life options and kept in inferior positions. This is not an improvement over how things were in the Roman period. It took a lot of fighting against Christianity to ever get women real civil and political rights. And no Biblical or Doctrinal arguments supported either venture. Only evidence-based reasoning eventually succeeded. Sans any real help from religion.
He doesn’t stop there with his astonishing falsehoods. Appallingly, Keller outrageously claims the introduction of Christianity “meant [people] could not act in violence and oppression toward their opponents” (p. 21). As if all the endless sectarian horrors and wars and hideous punishments for petty crimes perpetrated by Medieval Christendom never happened. The one thing Christianity has never done, is make people nice. It has never once convinced any significant population of its adherents to abstain from “violence and oppression toward their opponents.” Never.
As a theory for organizing society, the whole concept of Christianity fails. Keller is just full on lying to claim otherwise. That Christianity would have the effect he claims has been disproved in practice, again and again, for hundreds and hundreds of years, across all the traveled seas and inhabited continents of the earth. Not only by the Dark Ages. Not only by such atrocities as the European Wars of Religion or the Crusades or the Witchhunts or the Inquisition or the Holocaust or the worldwide genocide of indigenous peoples or the most brutal slave system ever invented by man. But everywhere else, everywhen else.
Texas still executes the mentally disabled. Christian America is still led into countless wars by entirely Christian politicians with the full endorsement of Christian leaders. And several top American Evangelicals just recently persuaded the Ugandan government to implement the state murder of gay people—because those American Christian leaders couldn’t get their kill-the-gays laws passed in the U.S., so they went there to murder gay people instead.
The complete and utter social failure of Christian moralities is thoroughly established. See my summary and references in The End of Christianity, pp. 338-39. As surely as the equally utopian claims of Marxists have been disproved by Cuba, China, and the USSR, so goes the same nonsense from the likes of Keller. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry really nail the point in their Intelligence Squared Debate: citing the relatively token examples of Christian charity does not negate the vast evils that always come with it. The one does not excuse the other. Not at all. That fig leaf is the same sham guise used by Hamas.
“But not all Christians,” you’ll protest. Sure. There are just as many nice Christians as nice atheists. Which is precisely my point. Christianity has exactly no effect. And only by lying about history, only by concealing vast realms of facts, can Keller pretend otherwise—pretend, that is, to what I can only assume are the most gullible of readers.
Summary
We should doubt our doubts? Not when our doubts are well founded, in extensive evidence. We doubt Christianity does any good for reforming people or society, because its entire history proves it doesn’t. We doubt Christianity should play any role in deciding our laws and policy, because its entire history proves it shouldn’t. We doubt Christianity is on the rise in free socialist democracies, because it plainly isn’t. We doubt that Christianity is any more likely to be true than any other religion on earth, because we plainly observe that Christians have no better evidence for it than anyone has for any other religion on earth. In the face of evidence-based reasoning, Christianity crumbles. To avoid exposing this, Keller has to lie. And he lies by omitting all the evidence against him, or by stating outright falsehoods. Sometimes both.
-:-
Next I’ll discuss how Keller tries to escape the Argument from Evil. That’s in Chapter 2 (that link will go live in early June).
Richard, I hope your posts are preserved online, perhaps copies of them being added at a later date to The Secular Web. The Secular Web should also feature a link at the top of all your pieces already posted that says, “For more recent articles by Richard Carrier visit his personal blog” with a hyperlink to your blog.
The Secular Web also has an index of replies to particular Christian apologists, so maybe they can add a link to this new piece of yours under the index, “Timothy Keller,” and also advertise it as a new link in their “What’s New” section.
If your readers enjoyed the first post from your review as much as I have, they might also enjoy my piece, “Things Christians Have Been Against,” since it lists interesting tidbits from Christian history not mentioned by Keller or yourself:
https://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2012/03/list-of-things-christians-have-been.html
You mentioned the Hundred Years War above, but not the Thirty Years War.
https://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2011/07/christians-0-christians-0-from.html
One correction: Utopian claims of Marxists was not disproved by Communistic governments. That’s a gross oversimplification and quite surprising to hear coming from you. You’re acting as though religious opportunists and paranoid, despotic leaders had nothing to do with those failures. You act as though Marx’s vision wasn’t perverted and distorted or as though there’s no clear distinction between communism and socialism. Rhetorically speaking, your point sounds nice, but it simply isn’t accurate.
It always gets perverted and distorted, just like Christian dreams of utopia do. That’s the point. It doesn’t work.
By this logic, nothing can work because anything can be perverted. Yes, Socialism, Communism, as well as Capitalism have their failings, but must we throw the baby out with the bath water?
I would ask you to examine the Basque Mondragon Corporation if you’d like to see a successful multi decade example.
Thanks for your work and effort.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a statement about rejecting false dichotomies, which is exactly my point: pure Communism is as much a guaranteed failure as pure Capitalism. A mixed system that develops checks and balances against each other’s dangers, tweaked empirically over time, is what always works better than either “pure” form of system. That’s precisely what it means to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. But throwing out the bathwater, literally means throwing out the purity of either Communism or Capitalism. Both must go. Both are bathwater. What remains is the baby that is both and neither, because it mixes them together into a hybrid third option, based on empirical testing of what actually works, and not based on a priori ideologies of what’s “supposed” to work.
The Mondragon is an example of exactly that: it is entirely dependent on the socialist-capitalist hybrid system of Spain and the EU, without which it could not be at all successful, as it depends on the militaries, courts, laws, and economies those larger entities sustain. It is therefore not a purely communistic system. It’s a jointly owned private enterprise under the umbrella of socialist capitalism. All baby. No bathwater.
PS I’m so happy to have discovered this article. I’ve recently watched his google talk and, being as uneducated as I am, could not clearly define all of the issue I had with nearly everything he said. So, Thank you!
The article refers to 1 Tim 9:2-15, which doesn’t exist. However, it does link correctly to 1 Tim 2:9-15.
Thanks! Fixed the transposed digits.
I wish Bart Ehrman could read this… it is a perfect rebuttal to the pathetic claims he makes in his latest debacle called the Triumph Of Christianity
Hi, Dr. Carrier. I have a question about what you said about the secularization thesis. In this article, you said that ‘“as societies progress, particularly through modernization and rationalization, religion loses its authority in all aspects of social life and governance.” Which is entirely confirmed. Everywhere.’
This seems to contradict what you said in another article titled ‘Hindus Rising: Meera Nanda and “The God Market”‘. You note that the secularization thesis is not true for India and that Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia (and the US) are exceptions.
These seem like contradictions, but it could very well be that I misunderstood one of the articles. It’d be great to get clarification on this and to know where you stand on the secularization thesis nowadays (since both articles are years old at this point).
India is not a first world country. It thus is not covered by the secularization thesis, which requires governments and societies to start meeting the basic needs of the population (it is thus a first world, not a third world phenomenon). I don’t know if you study the politico-economic situation of India, but, um, it is nowhere near that (though it is progressing in that direction now).
For example look at the transition state that some Central and South American countries are now in: they are not first world yet, but some have gotten farther toward that status than most of India (e.g. Mexico, Chile, Argentina), and accordingly those countries are seeing a measurable rise in atheism (albeit still swamped by religiosity). So we see the bud of the flower there. In some sections of India we see this too; but only where social inequality is declining as a determining factor (e.g. secularism is predominately a middle class phenomenon, and thus requires a large and well-tended middle class).
Studies have been done showing the correlation continues across the spectrum, even all the way into the first world. See Gregory Paul, “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions” and “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies A First Look”; and R Georges Delamontagne, “High Religiosity and Societal Dysfunction in the United States during the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century”; etc.
One of Delamontagne’s conclusions is “The findings are only minimally supportive of Paul’s hypotheses regarding the contributions of high religiosity to societal dysfunction and to the effects of societal dysfunction upon religiosity.”
That’s with respect to the causal thesis, not the correlation thesis, and that finding actually confirms the Secularization Thesis. In the Secularization Thesis the causal direction is the other way around (improved social conditions cause declining interest in religion, ergo worse conditions cause high religiosity). With respect to the causal direction being as Gregory Paul theorizes (that religiosity causes dysfunctional societies, the opposite causal direction of the Secularization Thesis) Delamontagne still finds “low to moderate support” for it. But he finds greater support for the Secularization Thesis: that dysfunctional societies cause religiosity. (Note this is not a dichotomous finding: he does find some causation of the religion —> dysfunction type, but a lot more of the dysfunction —> religion type.)
As the conclusion reads:
In short, Delamontagne argues it is because American society sucks and we don’t take care of our citizens (in contrast with the rest of the first world) that America remains so exceptionally religious. This is, indeed, the Secularization Thesis in a nutshell. Although he also does find some causation the other way around. And one can see obvious vectors for it: a shitty society causes religious voters and politicians who make more bad decisions regarding governance, creating more societal dysfunction, thus causing more religiosity—thus creating a vicious loop reinforcing itself, a loop America seems exceptionally trapped in. Although the steep recent decline of religion in America may change that over the next fifty years, which may even explain why European-style socialism has become unusually popular for once, even able to get many politicians elected, a strange day for America, albeit a welcome one.
Thank you for the concise, clear explanation. (Arthritis pain prevents my reading from one position for over 10 minutes, so I only read the first several paragraphs of Delamontagne’s article.) Thanks again.
You mentioned the hundred years war together with witch hunts, crusades, etc
Were the hundred years war primarily a religious war?
Oh, good catch; I confused two different “hundred years” wars; the one relevant was the second. I’ll emend the article, and link instead to the general category of religious wars.
Whenever this topic gets brought up someone is bound to use the argument of 20th century atrocities, can you please tell me about a historian that tackles claims like “scientific atheism and Darwinism” motivated them somehow or that “they killed millions because they believed in god” etc
A long time ago someone wrote an excellent essay on this and I sadly cannot recall the author or title to find it again.
But the gist was that (1) raw number death counts are a meaningless metric because they reflect means, not intent. Crusaders would have killed billions had they the means to. Likewise, raw numbers are a false metric when proportions are actually the relevant metric (the murderousness of the Crusades is far worse when you look at its murders as a percentage of available population, and account for the limitations created by their available means).
And (2) the common denominator is always fascism, not the bogus color of whatever false flag is being flown over it. Christianity has a toxic tendency to produce and support fascism, but it was still the fascism that caused medieval genocidal wars (there weren’t many Quaker crusades).
Conversely, Secular Humanism has a boonful tendency to suppress fascism, and thus has never been responsible for an atrocity at all. Stalin was not a Secular Humanist.
This is the problem of conflation (violating the Law of Excluded Middle), assuming for example that Stalin was a communist, communists are left wing, left wing means liberal, therefore all liberals are Stalin. This erases all the actual differences between left wing platforms. Stalin’s platform was fascist. Bernie Sanders’ platform is not. And the latter has no tendency to produce the former. So it’s a false analogy. To argue “Bernie Sanders is just as evil as Joseph Stalin” is therefore wildly fallacious, to the point of being literally ridiculous.
0) thing is, they already lied about Hitler and the involvement of Darwinism or whatever in his regime, so I need an expert to tell me what actually happened in communist countries. So I’m asking for a historian that looked at the major 20th century atrocities objectively so I can confirm what actually happened for real, like, did communists ban bibles from hotels? was anyone killed for refusing to step on a cross? were people killed for questioning Darwinism? how much of the religious claims are false or true to begin with?
and given that nowadays even the crusades is being justified as a “they were just fighting Muslim invaders” or whatnot, I might need an atheist historian that tackles the crusades too
1) religion still existed in the 20th century though, why weren’t there crusades that killed billions whereas the supposedly godless societies were the ones with “crusades” killing the most in the 20th century as opposed to the god fearing states like the United States or Brazil. I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s not so easy to explain this stuff to a religious person, and I suspect that at the end of the day it’s just the age old argument that people just can’t be good without god
nonetheless, it would be interesting to see a historian tackle percentage arguments, how many atrocities had a polpotian level of killing as a percent of the population?
2) good point about fascism. although, don’t you think some forms of secular humanism are being awfully close to a religion with how it supports wokeism or how some humanist organizations denounce Richard Dawkins or Michael Shermer for seemingly bad reasons?
0) There are ample reliable histories already written by secular historians of these things. So all you have to do is look at the real, non-apologetical history literature.
1) The Holocaust was a Crusade. It was a religiously-motivated genocide against religious targets (Jews, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.). It was not secular. The entire Nazi platform was one-to-one identical to Martin Luther’s (see No, Hitler Wasn’t a Pantheist). The Armenian genocide was also a Crusade. The Rwandan genocide was also a Crusade. And so on. Plenty of Crusades in the 20th century. The death count is not a factor of it being a Crusade or not, but solely a factor of means and time. Yet measure it instead as a percentage killed of the target population and it all looks comparable.
2) Calling Dawkins a sexist or exercising a first amendment right not to associate with him is not Stalin mass executing millions in a gulag. That’s not just a false equivalence; it’s an absurd equivalence. Which is exactly my point.
0) I was nonetheless hoping you could give me your recommendation to a secular historian that specifically tackles the religious dimension of communist regimes in a similar way Hector Avalos did with Stalin.
1) how much of it was a crusade, was the killing of communist Slavs also a crusade? was the whole European WW2 theatre a crusade? is this a mainstream view among historians? my school taught me nothing of this
didn’t the Nazi high command have too many occult and neo-pagan Teutonic notions to to be considered a part of mainstream Christianity at the time?
1.1) is there someone who measured atrocities as a percentage killed of the target population?
I understand your point, but religious people will still insist that Mao and Stalin were by far the worst of the bunch and that therefore this somehow proves sth or the other like that atheists want a government that is hostile to religion and it’s not so easy to convince them otherwise
2) true, the consequences are different. but in my opinion, some of them are too close to a religion for comfort, and I’m not sure how much I agree with the idea of organising atheists in such a way.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z78_rAg4Ldg
0) You need to ask a more specific question. There is no single book that covers “the religious dimension of all communist regimes” much less in respect to criminality of those regimes even less to specific instantiations of that criminality (like mass murder). You need to pick a regime and pick a crime. Then I can advise you on at least a competent treatment (I won’t know what is the “best” treatment, only what is a good one; to get the best, you need to ask this question of a historian who specializes in that regime and the era of that crime).
1) A Crusade means a religiously motivated genocide. By definition a non-religiously motivated genocide is not a Crusade. If you are using Crusade as simply a synonym of genocide, then you already have your answer (all genocides are genocides). But if you are using it as the religious cause of a genocide, you are asking for a logically contradictory thing (something that both is and is not a religious cause).
The Nazi sect of Christianity was no more weird in its paganistic elements than any other (Mormonism, Shakerism, Catholicism). And if all you mean by mainstream was that it wasn’t common outside Germany, you are simply stating a tautology. Whereas if all you mean by mainstream is majoritarian, since Germany was not majority any sect, all sects are “not mainstream” by your metric, even Catholicism. So the term seems useless to me.
Most Nazis were Positive Christians. Including Hitler. There is no way to make that not the case by complaining about their sect being weird. All sects are weird. They just differ in what ways they are weird.
1.1) You can do this yourself. The data is readily available for any case that interests you.
Bogus metrics are a favorite tactic of the religious. You should question even their framing. Their entire argument is unsound and invalid. This just circularly gets back to my original point. Re-read it.
2) I agree secular ideologies are the new religions. But this is changing the meaning of the word religion. That’s not illegitimate (words can change meaning by context) but you should avoid equivocation fallacies (starting with one meaning and ending with another, without acknowledging the effect of changing which connotation you are using). So you have to pick a connotation and explain why it matters to whatever question you are asking. You can’t flit about willy nilly changing connotations mid-question.
Indeed, you have done that twice here, not only switching between religion as supernaturalist belief to religion as simply a synonym of any worldview whatever, but now you have switched between religion as a belief system and religion as a physical institution of social organization, and even conflated just any physical institution of social organization with “religion,” which by now has rendered the word completely meaningless and of no use to any purpose. So straighten yourself out and pick a lane please.
0) please give me a competent treatment of a secular historian for china, I prefer sth that covers the entire communist period but if I had to pick a crime, then the cultural revolution or the occupation of Tibet or their recent politics about religious restrictions.
if possible, the USSR and its purges too please
1) I meant crusade in the sense of a religiously motivated genocide and i’m trying to understand how much of the holocaust and WW2 was religiously motivated.
was the euthanasia of the handicapped also religiously motivated for example? did Christian ideas that the ill are possessed by demons had sth to do with this? was the killing of Soviet prisoners of war also a crusade? was the whole European ww2 theatre a crusade? did Hitler for example seriously think that he can pick a fight with the USSR and beat the odds because he’s protected by Providence? how much religious thinking was there to it?
was positive Christianity a Christianity that was recognizably similar to the Christianity practiced all around the world and across time? Was it dangerously close to some type of Christianity that people believed in at the time? In my opinion it matters for similar reasons why the history of two thousand years of anti-Semitism mattered
1.1) good point
2) I didn’t say that they are a religion. just that some are close to a religion, with the video referencing a bit what I mean by this in a humorous fashion.
0) I don’t know what you are looking for regarding the history of Maoist China (the cause of it; any specific crime of it; its mere progress to the present; its ideology; its government; its economy; its demographic history; its role in world affairs; etc.). You have to pick one.
One way to start is to read the sections that interest you in Wright’s standard History of China and then follow up with its bibliographies. For an example of a more focused treatment, you could read Garver’s China’s Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic (Oxford University Press), because even though it focuses only on its subject, to explain each thing it must refer to corresponding internal affairs in China, and you can then follow the bibliographies and endnotes on that. Hence it all depends on what you want to know.
1) WW2 and the Holocaust are not the same things. The Holocaust was a religious pogrom enabled by WW2. WW2 was caused by standard geopolitical affairs (it had no direct religious motivation).
Decisions about euthanasia, for example, derived from Positive Christian beliefs regarding what God wants (natural selection was God’s design and thus God wanted “useless eaters” and “homosexuals” to die: see, again, No, Hitler Wasn’t a Pantheist; for formal histories, see Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus and Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich).
Positive Christianity was as unique as Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Shakers, or American Christian Nationalism. Its particular development has to do with German culture and history, stemming largely from the ideas of Martin Luther and early 20th century Nazi and proto-Nazi theologians, and was influenced by rivalry with Communism (in many ways Nazism defined itself religiously in opposition to communism, hence welfare for useless eaters was considered communist and therefore atheist and therefore even “too Jewish” to reflect God’s true will). See works just cited.
It was dangerously close to current Christian Nationalism (“kill the gays” candidates in America still command hundreds of thousands of votes, for example). See German Christian Nationalism and the American Church: Dr. Ryan Tafilowski and America’s Coming Weimar Moment and How Societies Turn Cruel.
The parallels between Trump and Hitler, and their respective supporters, are considerable (e.g. see ‘Trump Knows What He’s Doing’: The Creator of Godwin’s Law Says the Hitler Comparison Is Apt and The disturbing link between Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and Donald Trump comments and Is Donald Trump The New Hitler? Professor Compares Ex-President’s Language To Nazi Leader and How Trump Has Transformed Evangelicals).
2) You are simply confirming my point: you are being wishy washy and ambiguous in your use of these words, and so it is not clear what you mean to be saying or asking, or why it matters.
0) the cause of it, given that apologetics try to say atheism caused this one way or another
also, please give me similar recommendations for the USSR, particularly the Russian civil war and the stalin era. thanks alot for the help
1) but given that most of the victims were from communist countries and given they defined themselves as religiously in opposition to communism, cant we say that WW2 was at least exacerbated by religion? in one of the videos you gave it’s also said that Hitler thought he was “chosen by destiny” and that he used religion to go to war, if Hitler had a different opinion perhaps he wouldn’t have tried invading a superpower like the USSR or even Poland. you don’t think it’s a plausible argument?
2) please excuse me for the word wall, I’ll just say what comes to mind
part of the problem is that not much Unites secular humanists other than their secularism which I agree with anyway and which the USA is anyway(being the first secular country even) so it depends alot on who we are talking about. the Norwegian humanists might be different than many American humanists, plus they have a “there is no god” adhan which I haven’t heard any American humanists attempt, instead some of these humanists don’t want to associate with some other well known atheists who in my opinion did alot of good. so instead of it uniting us it becomes some weird thing that divides us and then some people point at this to laugh at
I think it boils down to me not agreeing with some of the logic they use to make some their decisions. which at times reminds me of religious gullibility at times.
let’s say it like this, what do you think were some of the best things secular humanists did, and how many are there anyway? because even in the example of Norway they seem to be a relatively small community, number wise is this movement successful?
community-wise it functions mostly like a religion, and although it’s secular, humanists who have religious beliefs nonetheless exist, many humanist organizations aren’t atheist exclusive including ones that don’t want to associate with Dawkins.
so secular humanism just feels like people being too clingy towards their religion and seemingly unimportant rituals rather than a helpful United atheist consciousness raising movement, how much is it different from sth like Unitarian universalism? it feels like sth that exists for people who were previously religious who nonetheless want to cling to sth close to a religion
if humanists have campaigned that the image of Darwin(one of the most important british scientists of all time) shouldn’t be removed from the pound sterling, I would have appreciated that, show the world that evolution is a given and that infact modern biology is based on it, it is not some nobody creationist term “theory” that can be easily discarded. let people know we are out there, make politicians consider you when they make their decisions, esp when there’s still much objection to teaching evolution in much of the world and religious schools
This seems a complete break to a new subject. You were talking about whether communism causes atrocities. Now you want to know if atheism causes communism. That’s weird. Even the Bible affirms Marx’s credo. And many communist Christian communes have been attempted (albeit on a small scale). There is no special link between communism and religion or its absence. There is religious communism. There is atheist communism. There are atheist capitalists. There are religious capitalists.
The happenstance of specific communist nations is a contingency of global history that has no connection to the specifics of any worldview.
also, please give me similar recommendations for the USSR, particularly the Russian civil war and the stalin era. thanks alot for the help
Since you keep changing subject, you need to start over and ask what specifically you want to know about those things (which are different things; Lenin is not Stalin). And please explain why you need me to help you. You can ask a librarian this question. Libraries are socialist institutions funded for this very purpose. You are already paying for them. Why not use one?
There was only one communist country fighting in WW2. And its victims are counted beyond WW2.
You seem to have no coherent purpose here.
Such a statement is vacuous without more specificity: what aspect of the war was exacerbated (what are you measuring?), and why do you think removing religion would have reduced that metric? Once you have a specific hypothesis, then you can test it by checking facts. I have provided guides for learning how to do this yourself:
A Vital Primer on Media Literacy
The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking
From Lead Codices to Mummy Gospels
It’s a vacuous statement. If Hitler had an anti-war ideology instead of a pro-war ideology… Yeah. Duh. That’s how contrafactuals work. You are asking about a specific substitution which is not symmetrical: if Hitler had not been a religious megalomaniac, could he have been a nonreligious megalomaniac? Obviously. Plenty of atheist megalomaniacs have existed. Religion is merely its instantiation, not its cause.
By contrast, to target the specific groups Hitler did can only be explained by his religious purpose. So the Holocaust was religiously motivated. WW2 was not. Compare the atrocities of Japan and Russia. The general reality of evil is non-specific to religion. Specific targets, however, can be specific to religion. So it all depends on what you are measuring and why. That’s why the targets were different between Germany and Russia and Japan: Germany had religiously-defined targets; Russia and Japan did not.
2)
All your examples are irrelevant to making any pertinent point. Unless you know of a secular humanist mass murderer, “secular humanists have diverse opinions and express them and seek democratic action toward them from time to time” is not a revelation or a censure.
0) I understand atheism doesn’t cause communism, Ayn Rand might be an example on the other side of the spectrum.
I’m just asking about a secular historian that talks about the causes of things like the Russian civil war, Stalin’s purges, and Maoist china, so that I can differentiate between the apologetics and the reality of the situation.
I’m just trying to learn from you, you gave me a list of options, one of them was the causes, so I chose the causes
libraries won’t necessarily point out useful info that helps in dealing with apologetics like in your example of the bible affirming Marx credo. you’re a historian who’s used to dealing with apologetics so I was hoping to learn from you. I’m really not doing this to annoy you and I appreciate your help.
1) weren’t the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia communist countries who were also involved in WW2? with nearly half of the victims of WW2 being Soviet civilians and a few million communists specifically killed in the holocaust? wasn’t this at least partially religiously motivated?
1.1) Hitler believed in a pro war god and that god chosen him and that he was protected by Providence and that god hates all kinds of people like Jews and communists, you don’t think this partly motivated him to start WW2?
and wasn’t Japan deeply religious during WW2? more than ever even with state Shinto and Zen Buddhism partly influencing their views such as that there is no real destruction of life and whoever gets killed will just get reincarnated to the glorious Japanese empire? Zen at war partly tackles this so was that really a secular geopolitical thing? Japan was pretty alone against the entirety of Asia and later on the USA, that’s not a reasonable thing to do unless you really think god is on your side.
I understand that it’s possible to be an atheist secular dictator, but would they really be in such a hurry to be martyrs or to overestimate themselves under the basis of “god is on our side” if it wasn’t for some of their specific religious beliefs?
2) sure, humanists are not mass murderers and I doubt any of them will be anytime soon.
I’m just explaining why I don’t use the secular humanists argument as a counter for 20th century atrocities, it’s for similar reasons why I don’t use liberal religions like Unitarian universalism.
I don’t necessarily identify with them and I gave some reasons as to why I don’t necessarily agree with some of their opinions or on how they do things, so it would be odd to use them in an argument.
and numerically how many governments did they control anyway? communism at a certain point controlled nearly a third of the world. but how many heads of states have been atheist secular humanists? there is one humanist party in Britain, but numerically just how successful were secular humanists in this regard? How many reached top positions?
I think at this point you have been shown how to find the answers to these kinds of questions yourself. This discussion is no longer relevant to anything here. So there is no further need of my comment.
The Wikipedia link you give for the witch hunts puts the number killed at 40-60 thousand, but isn’t that too low of a number?
The bishop of Wurzburg alone is said to have burned 9,000 witches between 1625 and 1628. So a millenia of witch hunts ought to have killed a whole lot more
Just how prevalent were the witch hunts?
Wikipedia is just a tertiary source, so it can’t really be relied on for difficult and obscure questions like the precise number of people a centuries long trend killed.
If you want to know what the best estimates can be based on the limited data available, you’d have to hunt for a secondary source (some peer reviewed work of modern scholarship). You will then have to get more precise as to what is being counted. The “Inquisition” targeted (and thus killed) far more than mere witches, for example (and of course terrorized the populace in other ways, with threats of jail, torture, dispossession, or exile).
This source puts it at between 100 thousand to ten million
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/femina-die-weniger-glauben-hat-a-36474aef-0002-0001-0000-000013512627
“zwischen hunderttausend und zehn Millionen.”
Do you think this estimate is plausible?
The inquisition is another case in which I think the numbers are too low, and they seem to only count the Spanish inquisition when there were several inquisitions spanning for centuries.
Most sources seem to give an estimate of the Spanish inquisition at a few tens of thousands and to say they only killed just a few people to make a point rather than it being a truly a millenia of terror across much of the world in which there was a genuine threat of at least torture if not death
I am skeptical, but mainly because this is not a peer-reviewed source. You are not quoting an academic study that used evidence and an accepted method of deriving the conclusion from it.
You need to find a real study.
Can you please tell me how can I find a “real study”? How can I differentiate between a real one and a false one? Can you please give examples?
See my Vital Primer on Media Literacy, particularly the section on The Problem of Peer-Review.
According to Halley‘s Bible Handbook, 1965 edition, page 726, “Historians estimate that, in the Middle Ages and Early Reformation Era, more than 50,000,000 Martyrs perished.”
Is this a plausible estimate to the amount of damage Christianity has done?
I doubt it. That would be the entire population of Europe.
But in any case, if they cite no source, you can give it no credit. It’s sources or GTFO.
Only by checking their source(s) can you determine what they are even counting (whose death counts as martyrdom? are we just counting casualties in wars? and which wars and why? and which casualties and why?), and then, how they counted it (what records are they using?), and thus determine whether their methods or data are reliable. One also needs to ascertain what their date range is (when do they count as the beginning of “the Middle Ages” and as the end of the “Early Reformation Era”?). And so on.
The Mongols killed nearly 50 million in the 13th century so killing a similar amount in a thousand years isn’t impossible.
It’s not restricted to Europe, there were crusader states in the middle east and the inquisition reached as far as India, it does not include the Americas nor the Thirty Years War(Halley reports 10-20 million died in the 30 years war)
the date is from at least 500 to at least 1600 plus all the inquisitions
The inquisitor Reinerius, who died in 1259, has left it on record: “Concerning the sects of ancient heretics, observe, that there have been more than seventy: all of which, except the sects of the Manichaeans and the Arians and the Runcarians and the Leonists which have infected Germany, have through the favour of God, been destroyed.” — Broadbent, E.H., The Pilgrim Church, Gospel Folio Press, 2002, p. 90 (originally published in 1931).
more than seventy sects have been destroyed, some of the counted persecuted include: “dissident” Christians, Manichaeans(a former major religion), Arians, Priscillianists, Paulicians, Bogomiles, Cathari, witches, Lollards, Jews, Culdees, Bohemian Brethren, Wicklifites, Thondracians, Beghards, Henricians, Sacramentarians, Hugonots, Lutherans, Calvinists, Josephists, Arnoldists, Donatists, Runcarians, Leonists, Waldenses, Albigenses, and other Protestants killed
the Papacy also essentially exterminated the Heruli shortly after 493 A.D., the Vandals soon after 533 A.D., and the Ostrogoths in 554 A.D, all of whom were asserted to hold to the Arian belief. The Hussites were also nearly exterminated
Again, I do not know how anyone can know the Mongols killed more people than the entire population of Europe or Asia. Nor is it clear what that has to do with “martyrs.”
So the same principles apply as I just delineated. You need to get at, and critically evaluate, the sources and how they are being used to count or claim any of this.
The population of China alone was 60 million in the 13th century, it’s not the population of the whole of Asia. All I’m saying is that the figure of 50 million is more than possible in a thousand years and is not unprecedented
https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#Mongol
https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#Population
the source is Halley and I just gave you the martyrs he talked about
Also, Halley [p. 790] writes:
“In Bohemia, by 1600, in a population of 4,000,000, 80 per cent were Protestant. When the Hapsburgs and Jesuits had done their work, 800,000 were left, all Catholics.
In Austria and Hungary half the population Protestant, but under the Hapsburgs and Jesuits they were slaughtered.
In Poland, by the end of the 16th century, it seemed as if Romanism was about to be entirely swept away, but here too, the Jesuits, by persecution, killed Reform.
In Italy, the Pope‘s own country, the Reformation was getting a real hold; but the Inquisition got busy, and hardly a trace of Protestantism was left. ”
if you disagree with Halley, then what do you think would be the right amount?
Your sources are unreliable. The entire figure for the Mongol kills is based on a guess by an atlas editor in the 1970s who had no actual scientific data (“The death toll of 40 million is “Loosely based on McEvedy, Atlas of World Population History. McEvedy states that the population of China declined by 35 million during the thirteenth century.”). Recent science confirms no such result. The Mongol conquest had almost no visible impact on China’s population. And being these are Chinese kills, any figure for this can’t mean “martyrs” anyway. So why are we talking about it?
I suspect similar unreliability in all your other statements. You need to check reliable sources, not “guesses.” And you need to clarify what it is you want to count (because so far, it doesn’t sound like it’s “martyrs” but just anyone killed in any war).
Wait, then how many do you think were killed in the Mongol Conquests? The site gives numerous estimates in the tens of millions not just one
Your own sources seem to agree that China’s population was at least 59 million, and agree that a war in the 17th century(probably Manchu conquest) killed at least 10-20 million so this is again doable if given a thousand years
I haven’t investigated the question (you’d have to ask someone with a PhD in Mongol studies or medieval Chinese studies), but I doubt anyone knows the answer to that question in the way you want. Where would they find any relevant data? And armies tend not to kill that many people. The point of conquering is to have the people still there to rule (farms are useless with no one to till them; and dead men don’t manufacture things for you). That’s why the Mongol conquest of China shows an impact (stalled population growth) but not a reduction of population. Which limits how many Chinese they could have killed to the low millions, or even just tens of thousands. But we can’t say for sure, because we have no precise data.
But please be aware, the Mongol conquest was the 13th century, not the 17th. The latter refers not to a conquest, but (in effect) a civil war. And again, no Christian martyrs are being counted here. Wikipedia claims 25 million casualties for this period over 70 years, but doesn’t explain what its source for that number is or what it is counting (just slayings, or deaths by famine or disease, or just total deaths, including natural causes already expected?). After just a quick search I do not see any reliable data on which to make such a claim. So you’d need to find some reliable source on this, based on actual data, and not just someone guessing.
yeah, armies tend not to kill that many people. but this wasn’t the run of the mill army, it was the army that created the world’s second largest empire not far behind the British empire
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire
even the low millions is still a lot of people
Wikipedia probably just got it’s ming estimate from here
https://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm#Manchu17c
ancient statistics are bound to be not as reliable as estimates for 20th century atrocities, but that’s all we have, we can either take it or leave it. your criteria is so demanding that you’d be bound to dismiss the entire events as unreliable
what other alternatives do you have? what’s your number for martyrs and heretics killed? How many were killed in events like the northern crusades or the Reconquista? Arguably among the longest wars out there
You can’t create a large empire by destroying its agricultural and manufacturing industries.
And I said the death toll could be far below a million (don’t try to fallaciously ignore properly stated error margins and pretend only the upper possible bound is the actual count; I’m not stupid, I won’t fall that).
And you still aren’t citing any reliable data. Just unjustified guesses, where we aren’t even being told what is being counted, much less how.
And yes: almost all ancient historical facts are unknowable. Best get used to it.
Meanwhile, if you actually want to do this seriously (and it does not sound like you do), I’ve told you how in comments above: get the data (actual data, which means actual factual historical information of some kind that comes from the actual period in question), assess its reliability (how prone to exaggeration or fabrication or error is that kind of data?), analyze what is being counted and how (e.g. a count of “deaths” is not a count of “martyrs”), then take seriously the error margins (the whole point of which is that you cannot know whether the real count is near the bottom margin or the top), and do not make claims that are not supported by this process.
I’m not aware of any source that puts the entirety of the Mongol conquests at the tens of thousands, we’re dealing with a period of nearly a hundred years that created the world’s largest empire, even the lowest estimate I’ve seen puts it at the low millions, are you aware of any source that puts it in the tens of thousands?
Halley‘s Bible handbook 1965 estimates that 900,000 Protestants were killed from 1540 to 1570 in the persecution of the Waldenses. For starters, can we agree on that estimate?
Again, with no actual sources, all your thoughts are idle.
And still you haven’t cited any sources, for the Mongol thing (which has no intelligible connection to “martyrs”), or anything else. There is no data cited in Halley’s, for example, nor any explanation of how a count was reached from that data, or even what it is counting. That’s just more idle unsourced guesswork. Useless.
Do please follow the procedure I have explained to you more than once now.
R.J. Rummel accuses the Mongols of 29,927,000 democides in the 13th through 15th Centuries.
Allen Howard Godbey, The Lost Tribes a Myth: Suggestions Towards Rewriting Hebrew History, p.385 (1974): “Genghis Khan is estimated to have destroyed twenty million people, Tamerlane twelve million.”
Jeremiah Curtin, The Mongols: A History, p.141: “From 1211 to 1223 in China and Tangut alone Jinghis and his assistants killed more than eighteen million five hundred thousand human beings.”
let’s focus on the waldensians for now. in 1545 The Cambridge Modern History estimates a total of 3,000 waldensians massacred and twenty-two villages destroyed. is this a reliable source for you?
You are not doing what I told you to do.
Just listing more unsourced guesses is failure.
Give me the data: how are these numbers being generated, using what data? What is being counted?
How: they counted them. We rely on humans to count their sheep, why would they get stupid when it comes to counting people
What data – the one provided to us by the historian Balduinus, take it or leave it. As you already said we can’t easily check behind ancient atrocities
What is being counted – killed waldensians
Counted what? Skulls?
Dude. You need to explain what the data is that is being counted. How did they arrive at those numbers?
Then you need to evaluate the reliability of that data for that purpose. Does it have an error margin? Etc.
Do the work.
Stop playing games.
There are scholars who claim Hypatia was killed solely due to political tension and not religious ones? Is this true?
There was no distinction between “political” and “religious” tensions then. She was murdered by Christians, not the state; and for reasons of ideology, not any political motive like rebellion. She was perceived as a witch interfering in Christian theocracy. The more compromising state interests favored leaving her be. The religious zealots murdered her in an extralegal rage anyway.
So calling her murder “just political” is like calling the murder of “witches” at Salem “just political.” In reality, but for Christianity, she would not have been murdered.
There is a Wikipedia article on hypatia stating it was no theological or religious dispute but rather her perceived political alignments as they thought that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop and that was what Socrates Scholasticus presents Hypatia’s murder as entirely politically motivated and makes no mention of any role that Hypatia’s paganism might have played in her death. Instead, he reasons that “she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop mainly angered the chriatian group. Tim O’Neil has stated there was no religious dispute between the Christians and herself at the time as most saw her in a positive light and were taught by her and venerated her. Do you have any scholarly sources for the claim that it was motivated by christian religious fanaticism as opposed to the political motives or that it wouldn’t have happened without Christianity? I understand politics and religion are not so easily detached but we would expect the sources to state their motives around her being a pagan as a contributing factor if this was the case. Many scholars seem to disagree. Thanks.
You’re skipping the details. See other comment.
Do you have any sources for that? Everything I have read says she was involved in a dispute between the leaders and not for being pagan.
Even Wikipedia makes clear the “dispute between leaders” was because of Christianity, and officials defending her against charges of witchcraft and paganism, and this resulted in a purely Christian mob killing her. And that’s all as recounted in the sources of the time.
But for Christianity, none of that would have happened.
Every source I’ve seen including Scholasticus Socrates says it was perceived entirely political as they thought that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop and makes no mention of any role that Hypatia’s paganism might have played in her attack. The claims around her witchcraft was an addition in later years.
“Orestes being reconciled to the bishop” was entirely a Christian faith issue. You can’t ignore why they were at odds, and why a Christian mob specifically would murder specifically Hypatia for it, and then pretend religion had nothing to do with it. It had everything to do with it. But for Christianity, none of that would have happened.
For example scholar Alan Cameron agrees and says it was A later addition and not something that was included during the time. Any sources you have countering this?
Sorry, I am lost here. I don’t know what you are referring to. You’ve replied to an unrelated thread. What does Alan Cameron agree with, what is “it” that was a later addition, and an addition to what?
Wasn’t the “the worldwide genocide of indigenous peoples” motivated by robbing them rather than by religion?
Wasn’t slavery motivated by greed and need for labour rather than religion?
You should take care to read the article you are commenting on.
I did not argue native genocide was caused by Christianity. I argued that it wasn’t stopped by Christianity, i.e. Keller’s claim that Christianity has a salutory effect on world society is false. Christians could be just as evil as everyone else, and indeed, were. Christianity simply isn’t a useful drug. It has no measurable effect on the goodness of society.
Thus, the native genocides (in combination with all the other examples I listed; you seemed to skip all the others for some reason) disprove Keller’s claim that ‘the introduction of Christianity “meant [people] could not act in violence and oppression toward their opponents”’ (p. 21). Likewise his false claim that “The early Christians mixed people from different races and classes in ways that seemed scandalous to those around them” (p. 20); when in fact, no one thought that was ridiculous—except all the racists who despised it, who tended just as often to be Christians. Etc.
What do you think is a useful drug?
I don’t understand the question.
Are you asking if aspirin is useful?
Or are you asking if it is possible to have a beneficent false belief?
If the latter, see What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad.
Nonetheless, I’m interested, how much responsibility does Christianity bear for the genocide of the native Americans and for the Atlantic slave trade?
You’d have to be more specific as to what you want to know.
Christianity isn’t a person. It’s a system of ideas. So “responsible for” depends on what you mean by that. It can mean “was a participating cause of” or “was a sufficient cause of” or “was a necessary cause of,” and none of those are the same thing. There is even a fourth thing, negligence, which is “it was not capable of preventing” which is not a cause at all but the absence of one (which is why Trolley Problems are hard).
You also have to define “Christianity.” Do you mean, first century Christianity, or 10th century Christianity, or 17th century or 19th century? Western Christianity? Eastern? Majority Christianity? Fringe? Etc.
And then there is the question of swaps, i.e. contrafactual modeling. Apart from all that is the question of “If we deleted Christianity from history, what would have happened differently?” And the answer might not be black-and-white (e.g. you might get a far milder form of genocide, rather than the mere absence of it).
To illustrate the problem:
Most people (including until recently me) assumed slavery was a universal outcome of cultural evolution and thus a necessary failure mode we all had to find our way out of. But then I discovered China never had a slave economy. It had a fringe category of slaves, but punitive and scarce; its agricultural and mining industries (or any other) never depended on slave labor. Ever. Yet the Han Dynasty achieved nearly the same level of civilization as the Roman Empire (see Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? and Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America).
So, it isn’t true that Judaism or Christianity invented slavery. But it also isn’t true that the introduction of Christianity was necessary for or even likely to ever end slavery (hence: China). It appears to have been causally indifferent to slavery. But it might have exacerbated slavery.
The Christian systems of slavery were, after all, the most brutal and horrific ever implemented in human history. It is hard to find any cause you could remove that would have changed that outcome other than Christianity. Even Islam didn’t devolve into such evils (Islamic slavery remained the relatively more humane variety developed by the Romans). So why is Christian culture the only culture on Earth to have done so?
I do not know. I only know that it did. And this looks causal.
One hypothesis is that Christianity, to survive, had to become anti-intellectual and authoritarian (just as Islam did), but in Christianity’s case, it stumbled upon a mechanism of rationalizing evil that permitted it to do far worse things (the history of Christian justifications of racialized slavery and brutalist chattelism illustrates this). Islam certainly had its own mechanisms for that (hence there are manifestations of brutalism in Islam), they just never went so far as to justify anything like the Christians did with respect to slavery.
Okay. Now switch gears to native genocide, which mostly means Manifest Destiny, but not only that (that was just the worst of it); secondary manifestations can be cited in the history of Spain in the Americas, and of Australia and Canada, for example. It appears to be a Western Christian thing (examples in Eastern Christianity are harder to come by).
Suppose we took Christianity out of the picture, and suppose that this resulted in the Roman Empire surviving its fall and carrying on. Either it would inevitably gravitate to some other aggressive exclusivist religion that would just replace the evils of Christianity (which is unlikely, considering that other societies didn’t, e.g. India and China remained polytheistic and so there is clearly no cultural-evolutionary trend), or it would remain pagan, which is the more likely.
Then, what would have happened in the Americas when Rome discovered them? Well, we can reasonably infer, the same thing that always did: Rome would do some conquering, followed by a lot of assimilating. Rather than kill off its conquered populations, it tended to educate them and integrate them and tax them, until foreign peoples literally were sitting in the Senate and even becoming Emperor (the Severans, for example, ultimately hailed from Africa; its founder was predominately native Libyan, and they ruled barely a hundred years after the Empire was established, a mere two hundred since Julius Caesar).
In other words, Western Christianity, for whatever reason, appears to have caused the uniquely evil belief that it was Christlike to kill off populations rather than having to rule them. There isn’t really any other factor to credit. It can’t be European culture apart from Western Christianity, since there weren’t any European cultures like that (hence: Roman Empire).
Perhaps Western Christianity generated such a peculiarly arrogant sense of superiority that allowed rationalizing greater and more pervasive and selfish evils than other religions did (even Eastern Christianity). And perhaps this was a random walk (stumbling into this toxic version of the religion) caused by its inevitably necessary anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism (but not with necessity; hence: Eastern Christianity and Islam did not do this, despite having many of the same defects).
Those qualities were necessary for any virus to dominate (by aggressively killing all competitors). But Western Christianity somehow stumbled into the very worst form of this virus. I do not know the specific reasons why. But it would make a good dissertation subject.
I don’t think Islam remained like the relatively more humane variety of slavery of the Romans, it produced millions of deaths similar to Christianity(which Roman slavery didn’t do), it started sooner, than christianity and it lasted longer
http://necrometrics.com/pre1700b.htm#ISlave
if for example a belief in Christianity was replaced by stoicism how different would our world be, is that a useful drug? what are the things that make a good society if not christianity
Sooner, you mean, than the black slave trade. Christians had slaves from day one, and in fact created serfdom (de facto slavery, effectively mass-ending the freedom of millions of farmers—that was Constantine).
The duration isn’t the comparison. The severity is. The “post exploration” slave system created by Christians was by far the worst in the world—far more dehumanizing, brutal, and relentless. And it essentially created modern racism. Islam, by contrast, kept what was essentially the Roman system, with a continuous practice of manumussion and integration and actual slave rights.
(Note I am only counting authorized slavery, not illegal systems fought by mainstream religious authorities; hence fringe Mormon sex slavery today does not count against Christianity in this comparison any more than Nigerian does against Islam.)
When asking contrafactuals, we usually mean, what most likely would replace a thing removed, not what we would prefer would replace it. The comparand there is religion, and the answer there is “had Rome never been Christian, likely it would have remained pagan,” i.e. polytheistic, which was not exclusivist and facilitated cultural and political integration of subject peoples, requiring no genocide to pacify and profit from.
But if you want to change tack entirely and ask “what would have been best to replace it,” in terms of outcomes (the best society, including the fastest social and scientific and technological progress), the answer is Secular Humanism, which in context would mean something more like Stratonian Aristotelianism or Posidonian Stoicism (either of which were closer to modern humanism than anything else likely to gain elite support then; even better would have been Aristippan Epicureanism, but that was too liberal for the ancient elite to widely adopt).
Why do you think epicureanism would have been better?
Because its philosophy was closer to reality, and everything closer to reality is closer to Secular Humanism and further from toxic worldviews.
This is because, in particular, Epicurean ontology was closer to reality and it’s metaethics (particularly under Aristippus) was closer to reality.
Aristotelianism surpassed it only in epistemology, but as eclecticism was the most popular thing under the Empire, it would be easy for a Neo-Epicureanism to integrate Aristotelian epistemology. But just as well could be Aristotelianism integrating Epicurean metaethics and ontology.
Regarding “China never had a slave economy…Yet the Han Dynasty achieved nearly the same level of civilization as the Roman Empire”, can the same be said of India?
I am not familiar enough with India to answer that question.