*cough cough Crusades*

@Gef – without defending either the Crusades or Donohue, it is perhaps worth noting, if you're playing this sort of numbers game, that even the bloodiest estimates of deaths during the Crusades tops out at around 9 million. The 20th century does have the distinction of being the bloodiest and perhaps the least religious in history.

@libmas: The world's population was also a lot higher in the 20th century than in the days of the Crusades. You can also look at the other human rights atrocities that have been done in the name of religion (i.e. slavery) that didn't necessarily result in death.

You certainly can, though it's not immediately clear to me that slavery was always or even mostly instituted/maintained in the name of religion. And while the 20th century population was certainly higher, I still think a pretty good case can be made that we got much more efficient and large-scale about killing in the past 100 years than we ever were before, smallpox blankets notwithstanding.

Nonsense. The subjugation (and even genocide) of indigenous populations by Western, Christian imperialists in every corner of the globe (including the good ol' USA) was often justified in religious terms. "Godless heathens" and all that. And the Confederacy always, ALWAYS defended slavery as being an expression of God's natural order.

There were lots of slaves and slaveholding cultures long before Western Christian imperialists, DMcK, and a lot of those slaves were enslaved without any appeal to religion. And using religion as an excuse isn't quite the same thing as doing it in the name of religion. It was done in the name of profit. Religion was often hauled out to provide cover – defense for the practice, as you note.

@libmas, Van Buren Boy:

Georges-Bataille-style atrocity-pricing aside, is it more horrific to kill a staggering number of people with the benefit of modern technology, or to kill a smaller but still virtually unthinkable number of people despite your lack of it? Also, us humans are still pretty good at killing a lot of people in a short period of time without much in the way of modern mechanized warpower at all.

You people just fail to believe in the inherent goodness of the white man. That's your fucking problem.

We are indeed. And I sure don't want to get into arguments about what's more horrific than what. But I do think the bloodiest/perhaps least religious charge stands.

Whoops! My list bit was aimed at Gef.

STORY OF THE EYE (where's Matt?)

FWIW, Popes Gregory IX and Nicolas V issued papal license and/or endorsement of slavery as a means of both punishment and conversion (largely of the Saracens, but also for use in the New World). That it wasn't until the 19th century that the Church wavered on the institution was largely seen by the Portuguese as an endorsement of the institution. Oh, and let's not forget Papal galley slaves.

Let's also not forget that Manifest Destiny was pretty much a call from God to go slaughter native populations and steal their land.

@libmas: Donohue's is a false equivalence. The Crusades were explicitly religious — war for a particular religion's sake.* Hitler's war, and Stalin's and Mao's purges,** had anti-religious components, but only because they recognized that the religious power structures stood in the way of their dictatorial ambitions and they opted to dismantle rather than coopt them.

To be reductive, the Crusades were war in the service of religion; Hitler, Stalin and Mao waged atheism in the service of war. Their terrible activities may have been "bloodier than" the Crusades — no argument there — but they certainly weren't primarily about atheism the way the Crusades were primarily about religion.

Anyway.
*insofar as any war can be about anything other than seizing territory and power, and even the Crusades weren't purely "about religion" (cf. the Fourth Crusade)

**also: the French Revolution, the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian civil war, etc.

@Gef: Fair nuff. I really wasn't trying to affirm Donohue in his criticism of the Pope. The "bloodiest century" bit, admittedly, is more of a reply to the notion that, if only we could get rid of religion, THEN things would be better.

Nice.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbvr0m_shortfilms

My favorite Donahue moment was when he argued that the rapist priests weren't pedophiles because the boys in question were 12 or 13.

they have excellent potato salad.

Gothenburg looks quite nice.

The Inquisition was nothing if not methodical. And since the executions followed upon court trials, an exact number is not maybe not so hard to believe?

Catholics INVENTED bureaucracy. I bet the number is accurate; the definition of "killed," however, is probably a little hazy, and may exclude those who died of their injuries five minutes after being taken off the rack or being boiled in oil, etc.

I don't know — we're not very good at coming up with precise numbers for this sort of thing even today (see the Rwandan genocide link above). I don't doubt, as libmas suggests, that some 16th-century monk diligently added up lists of names and arrived at 1,394. But it seems a stretch to assume that the reports generating the lists were at all accurate or comprehensive. (No al-Jazeera back then pointing cameras everyhere.)

I'm also interested in the idea (one of Gregg Easterbrook's recurrent themes in TMQ) that we use fatuously over-specific numbers to give an air of scientific credibility to what are actually rough estimates. In the context of sports, the pretense is that we can instantaneously perceive minute fractions of time and distance, as in "Add four tenths of a second [not three, not five] to the shot clock."
So, 1,500 dead = guess. 1,394 dead = SCIENCE!