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The best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem witch trials

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — In recent months, a spate of atheist books have argued that religion represents, as "End of Faith" author Sam Harris puts it, "the most potent source of human conflict, past and present."

In his bestseller "The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins contends that most of the world's recent conflicts – in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in Kashmir, and in Sri Lanka – show the vitality of religion's murderous impulse.

The problem with this critique is that it exaggerates the crimes attributed to religion, while ignoring the greater crimes of secular fanaticism. The best example of religious persecution in America is the Salem witch trials. How many people were killed in those trials? Thousands? Hundreds? Actually, fewer than 25. Yet the event still haunts the liberal imagination.

It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness.

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

Moreover, many of the conflicts that are counted as "religious wars" were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to territory and power. Can the wars between England and France be called religious wars because the English were Protestants and the French were Catholics? Hardly.

The same is true today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims – "God gave us this land" and so forth – but the conflict would remain essentially the same even without these religious motives. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.
Blindly blaming religion for conflict

Yet today's atheists insist on making religion the culprit.




Atheists hypocritically portray themselves as taking an intellectual high road with volumes of rants proclaiming 'their beliefs' are superior to 'everyone elses beliefs'.

What I find truly shocking is that diety believers dont see through the orwellian hypocritical subterfuge laid out by atheist the attacks pretending they are not a religion.

It leads any sane person looking at the facts, that clearly this is one belief system versus another, yet atheists demand the world simply accepts the atheist belief system is not a religion while condemning all other belief systems as [religions] generally in what can only be described as the best contrived monumental top shelf hypocrisy of all time.