Doesn't refute my point that the fact that Christians as well as "Christians" oppressed the Indians were mostly coincidental; had Europeans been atheists the results would have likely been very much worse for the natives.
Silly counterfactual. A more interesting one would be if Europe had remained firmly Pagan instead of substantially Christianizing in the first millennium AD. In that case, one could imagine that no great religious alliances would oppose the Ummayad and Ottoman caliphates, nor would Byzantium hold out as long as it did... eventually we might be looking at an Islamic colonization of the New World, as the well-regarded Islamic traditions of science and scholarly inquiry ultimately discovered America.
A big question would be whether colonization and conquering would proceed at the same pace without the Spanish efforts, and if not, whether smallpox resistance and the like could have taken root and afforded the native American peoples a better fighting chance. And would the same ethnic groups be represented among the colonists? What slavery practices would we have seen?
Still hard to beat 20th century communist atheists in efficiently killing off their own populations or French revolutionaries in being creatively evil.
I don't think you realize how many people Stalin, Mao, Hitler have killed. We all know Hitler had to resort to incineration to get rid of the bodies. Stalin filled mines with the remains of Ukrainians and others. They couldn't dig holes big enough to bury the dead. I have no idea what Mao did with the 50-80 million bodies he had on his hands.
Between just these 3 guys your looking at well over 100 million people and that is not including war dead. Just people being exterminated for various reasons.
So to say that nothing beats the genocide of the Americas is not accurate.
Hitler used the term in Article 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party represents the standpoint of Positive Christianity". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity
And to be intellectually honest, none of those you stated committed atrocities in the doctrine of atheism because it has none. Don't throw atheism under the bus when someone criticizes your religion because atheism is the lack of belief in gods, nothing more.
It is only when someone mounts sweeping attacks on all or specific religions, based on things that, -while done in name of said religion-, are not described in the sacred texts of said religion, -then I do use the opportunity to gove a little history lesson.
Because if I and other Christians should feel bad because genocide of X, Y and Z then certainly atheists should feel bad because of the reign of terror, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc.
Or rather; not. None of us should. If we should feel bad about anything it is that we aren't doing more now. That certainly bothers me.
Similarly, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot weren't working off some sort of atheist guidebook; atheism was incidental to their 'religion', which was communism. They didn't spread atheism for atheism's sake, they oppressed religious powers because they were competitors for power.
And as the OP said, Christianity today is still used to persecute and oppress. Catholicism still covers up paedophile priests. There are states in the US where an atheist is barred from holding office. Fake 'faith healers' continuously bilk people out of their money. Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
Yes, there are abusive atheists in modern western democracies, but those atheists are not saying things like "women can't hold positions of power" or "ain't no paedophiles here" or similar to protect their atheism.
You're tired of feeling bad because of the dark corners of your religion? I'm tired of the canard of Stalin/Mao/Pot.
> Some flavours of the faith don't allow women to be priests.
The only thing (arguably) Christian mentioned in this thread is this doctrinal issue because it's the only thing supported by some amount of scripture (though good-faith Christians disagree on this particular issue).
I defend none of it.
Just be so intellectually honest as to admit that Christianity brought a number of good things and Atheists hasn't been without fault and we can meet in the middle.
As I have mentioned before I don't like religious flamewars on HN.
You take part in a lot of them.
Maybe I should just flag and move on.
I still hope I am right when I say I never start and I rarely downvote opponents, instead trying to present the other forgotten point of view :-/
The absolute numbers may well favor the atheists. But there's only one reason for that: those are who the genocidal maniacs happened to be in the 20th century. The next genocidal maniac will probably blow all of those away, regardless of religious beliefs, simply because of the number of people available to kill, and the technology available with which to kill them.
The world population at the time of the Great Leap Forward was 2.4x larger than at the time of the Taiping Rebellion. It was about 6x larger than at the time of the French Wars of Religion and the early phases of the conquest of the Americas, 10x larger than when the Crusades got started, and 15x larger than when the An Lushan Rebellion killed perhaps 5% of all humans on the planet.
It would have been difficult to kill 100 million people during the conquest of the Americas, because that probably would have required millions of immigrants just to bring the population back up to zero afterwards.
In terms of languages lost, cultures destroyed, peoples wiped out, land permanently lost to conquerers, and duration, the Americas "win" by a huge margin.
By the way, do you know why the Atlantic slave trade got started? It's not because Africans made such good slaves. It's because the conquerers of the Americas kept working their native slaves to death and began to run out of natives.
China's population recovered to the level prior to the Great Leap Forward in a few years. I'm not sure of the USSR's population ever significantly dropped, as it was a sort of slow burn that population growth kept up with. Europe's population recovered to pre-WWII levels in a few years. How long did it take the Native American population to recover to pre-contact levels? It's hard to tell, because the pre-contact civilizations were so devastated that there's no good idea of how many people there were, but it's likely that they still haven't recovered, and may never do so.
In remote villages bystanders were sometimes allowed to cut the flesh from the dead and take it back home. - See more at: https://www.historytoday.com/frank-dik%C3%B6tter/looking-bac...
Also I think it is important to scope that "atheism" is usually a shorthand for "Western, Secular Humanistic Atheism" which is philosophically an off-shoot of Protestantism in general and Calvinism in particular. You get a different set of results when you look at Buddhist Atheists or Hindu Atheists for example (because in neither of these traditions is religion dependent on belief like it is in Christianity).
Hope that helps.