By Michael Ashcraft —
The next time an atheist accuses Christianity of being responsible for untold mass murder throughout history, point out to him that atheism in the 20th Century alone killed 200 million people.
“Godlessness kills,” says Barak Lurie in his new book Atheism Kills. “Godlessness has resulted in far more mayhem and murders than all Judeo-Christian religion institutions combined. There is no comparison. Virtually every culture that has rejected God has collapsed or engaged in horrific mayhem. By contrast, virtually all cultures grounded on the Judeo-Christian tradition have flourished.”
Atheistic governments, seeking to impose their vision of utopia, feel compelled to eliminate any and all opposition, according to research from Atheism Kills:
- The French Revolution: up to 40,000 deaths.
- Stalin: 20 million deaths.
- Mao Tse-tung: up to 70 million deaths.
- Fidel Castro: up to 141,000 deaths.
- Ho Chi Minh: up to 100,000 deaths.
- Pol Pot: 2 million deaths.
- Kim Il-sung: 1.5 million deaths.
- Hitler: 11 million deaths.
The list goes on. “Being an atheist dictator advancing atheist doctrine has always led to brutality and killings,” Lurie observes.
By comparison, what is the tally of the bloodbath supposedly orchestrated by Christianity?
- The Spanish Inquisition: up to 5,000 killed.
- The Crusades: 1 million killed.
- The Salem Witch Trials: 19 killed.
- The Ku Klux Klan: 3,446 killed.
- Religious wars post Reformation: 11 million.
“Atheism killed hundreds of millions in the span of only 30 years,” Lurie writes. “The number of killings on (the alleged) behalf of Christianity (are) minor in comparison and ranged over approximately 800 years.”
Lurie decided to become an atheist at age 11 when he stumbled across the clever arguments wielded by atheists. Then he went to college and rediscovered God through philosophy classes.
Fyodor Dostoevsky was instrumental to his floundering faith in atheism. The Russian novelist explored the consequences of atheism — the resulting absence of all morals — in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
“It was he who first made me see the dangerous world of my own atheism,” Lurie writes. “His books show the consequences of living according to dangerous beliefs.”
Lurie graduated with honors from Stanford University before earning a law degree from UCLA and a master’s in business administration from UCLA’s Anderson School of Business in 1989. He now is a managing partner of Lurie & Seltzer, a law firm in Los Angeles.
He finished Atheism Kills in 2017.
“Atheism Kills is a robust, relentlessly interesting and intellectually invigorating read,” says Dennis Prager in the foreward.
The book does more than just compare death census data. It also shows how atheism spawns bigger government, progressivism and eugenics (and its modern version: abortion).
The book exposes the flaws of atheism: Its moral relativity breeds evil. It deprives man of purpose and significance. It stymies arts and science. It has given no charitable organization to the world. It teaches man only to live for his own pleasure and not to risk one’s life to save another.
The author profiles one notorious incident, when Marc Lepine systematically shot and stabbed 14 women to death and injured 10 others at the University of Montreal in 1989. A misogynist, Levine released all the men from the engineering class — and they did nothing to try to stop him. The author maintains this cowardly posture is a natural outcome of atheism, Lurie says.
By contrast, U.S. Sgt. Roddie Edmonds, captured during the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, rallied his fellow Americans to support the Jews in his company. When the concentration camp ordered all the Jews to report for killing the next morning, Edmonds, a committed Christian, organized the entire group of POWs to “fall out” the next morning.
The Nazi commander was bewildered: “They cannot all be Jews,” the camp leader barked.
“We are all Jews here,” Edmonds responded. “If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war.”
The commander relented, and Edmonds saved 200 Jewish American soldiers.
This is what a belief in God leads to: convictions about what is evil and what is worth dying for, according to Lurie.
Atheism Kills also takes aim at the absurd passivity of progressive governments when faced with radical Islam. These liberal and atheistic — or atheistic-leaning — governments are in fact empowering today’s “greatest threat to civilization.”
Lurie sees in Western Civilization a slow degeneration much like the fall of Rome.
But he sees hope. Atheism must be attacked so that faith in God and the restoration of values can rescue America — and Europe.
“Without God there can never be any universal interpretation of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil,” Lurie writes. “In a world where the human reigns supreme, you can expect only two outcomes: a world descending evermore into chaos or a world without liberty.”
Michael Ashcraft teaches journalism at the Lighthouse Christian Academy of Santa Monica.
Now, the end of this age, is the ‘kingdom of death’ which means that people’s minds are ruled by the spirit of death. This is why one can hear the same people who the one moment expresses great sorrow over all evil and killing for to the next moment take great pleasure in horror movies criminal novels and/or support abortion and euthanasia. The spirit in man can not be satisfied if there is not a dead body involved. Only truly repentance on every level of our lives and thoughts can deliver us from it. And it starts in the thought life by rejecting everything which has not its origin in the Spirit of Eternal Life who is the Lord Jesus Christ.
The devil showed Jesus all his kingdoms from the beginning of the world to the end of the world because God measures never in ‘meter’ but in times and seasons:
“the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time Luke 4:5.
In Revelation 6 one can see that the first kingdom (The Lord says that He is the first and the last)is Gods eternal kingdom which means that the last will be the white horse (force) again because God describes everything in times and the clock is a circle exactly as the clock.
Therefore is the kingdom of death the pale horse (spiritual force) which rules this last time which is an evil time. This has nothing to do with ‘atheism’ because one can find many ‘christians’ who the one moment expresses sorrow over all evil and killings for the next moment take great pleasure in a criminal novel or horror movies.
“There is therefore now no condemnation (only!) to them which are in (obeys and hears ) Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh (the spirit of this world), but (only!) after the Spirit (of Life). For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and (kingdom of ) death. Rom 8:1-2
Very interesting
Atheism has never been the cause of any sort of mass murder. To begin with, Hitler and Stalin were never atheists, and neither was Mao. One could argue Pol Pot was, but that’s the only dictator on the list that can be safely speculated to have been atheist.
At any rate, cherry picking is a pretty major indicator that one’s argument is week. I live in a small town in southern Missouri, I could give a dozen examples of how rude and mean I am treated every day, but that doesn’t mean I can go off and say that is representative of the average Christian or reflective of Christan values. To begin with, while there is a high percentage of people in this area who are Christian, I have no idea if the people I run into even identify as Christian. Secondly, there are factors aside from the presence or absence of religious belief that affect one’s disposition, and I believe religious belief to not weigh heavily on one’s personality (though that is relatively untested conjecture).
Atheism does not kill. One can look and find plenty of radical Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and even Buddhist groups, but no atheist. This is because atheists aren’t militant or even a cohesive group: the only thing you’ll see most atheists agree on is that there is no evidence for the existence of a deity. Some advocate for secular government, but that’s as strong as atheistic politics gets.
There has never been an atheist government in recorded history, and there has never been an atheist terrorist group. Secular? Sure, but that isn’t the same thing whatsoever. When I say Stalin and Hitler were not atheists, I mean it. There governments may have been relatively secular, but they were both Christian and both worked heavily with the church. I am not condemning Christianity here, I am merely showing that atheism has never been the cause of any sort of huge tragedy.
As far as public policy issues such as abortion goes (which is nothing like eugenics), blaming atheism for that is fallacious. Abortion is supported by people of all sorts of faith groups, and by some atheists (certainly not all). These issues rarely have anything to do with atheism, and a person’s lack of religious faith rarely plays a role in their policy decisions.
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