In recent years militant advocates of atheism such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have argued that belief in God causes violence and bloodshed. They therefore argue that all religious beliefs should be abandoned. I thought I would put their claims to an empirical test. Let’s compare the five most influential Christians of the past 100 years with the five most influential atheists. By most influential, I don’t just mean people who said things and waved their hands in the air; I mean people whose beliefs have had the most profound effect on the lives of other people.
The top 5 on the Christian list would probably be Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The top 5 on the atheist list would probably be Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung and Leon Trotsky. Now, which of the ten listed people have been most responsible for promoting violence, and which have been most responsible for promoting peace?
The list of the ten worst genocides of the 20th Century is instructive: 1. Mao Zedong (49 to 78 million, atheist); 2. Joseph Stalin (13 million, atheist); 3. Adolf Hitler (12 million); 4. Hideki Tojo (5 million); 5. Pol Pot (1.7 million, atheist); 6. Kim Il Sung (1.6 million, atheist); 7. Mengistu Haile Mariam (1.5 million, atheist); 8. Ismail Enver (1.2 million); 9. Yakubu Gowon (1 million); 10. Leonid Brezhnev (0.9 million, atheist).