The Record of Atheism

I enjoyed this guest editorial from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution yesterday. It is by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason Ministries. In it he addresses those who claim the worst atrocities of history have taken place in the name of God. Actually, those atrocities came to us courtesy of the godless . . .

The simple fact of history is that the greatest evil has resulted from the denial of God, not the pursuit of God. Conservative columnist Dennis Prager has noted, "In this (20th) century alone, more innocent people have been murdered, tortured and enslaved by secular ideologies —- Nazism and communism —- than by all religions in history."

Grab an older copy of the Guinness Book of World Records and turn to the category "Judicial," subheading "Crimes: Mass Killings." You'll find that carnage of unimaginable proportions resulted not from religion, but from institutionalized atheism. (The 2007 edition of Guinness does not contain those same categories.)

Guinness reports, "The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against another is the 26.3 million Chinese killed during the regime of Mao Zedong between 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed . . . the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million."

In the former Soviet Union, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that state repression and terrorism took more than 66 million lives from 1917 to 1959 under Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

The worst per capita genocide happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. According to Guinness, "More than one-third of the 8 million Khmers were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979."

The greatest evil does not result from people zealous for God. It results when people are convinced there is no God to whom they must answer.

He also addresses things like the Salem witch trials, about which George Grant writes:

Though the Puritan clergy of Massachusetts had unanimously opposed the Salem witch trials, the episode was seen by them all as a terrible example of misdirected zeal. Thus, in December, 1696, they resolved among themselves to call for a general fast day to be held on January 15, 1697, "That so all of God's people may offer up fervent supplications unto him, that all iniquity may be put away, which hath stirred God's holy jealousy against this land; that He would show us what we know not, and help us, wherein we have done amiss, to do so no more." Judge Samuel Sewell and the jury of the trials all confessed their error and implored God's forgiveness and further direction. Though modern skeptics love to point to the Salem witch trials as a special blight on the church's character, rarely is the end of the story told in full.

In any case events like the witch trials, bad as they where, pale in comparison to the routinely unbridled bloodletting of those in opposition to God and the gospel. Let's keep the record straight.