smokinghot when I opened that page the link isn't active in either Opera or IE so I thought it was dead I didn't think to C&P SORRY!
The blog and the list are two different entities. Where did the blog came up with his number is beyond me and he substaniates nothing. The web site with the list (Matthew's) is very extensive but I found no tally of deaths due to religion. If nothing else thanks for the link to the second site - some amazing stuff on it.
I'm was talking just this century and his list (Matthew's) encompasses from the beginning of written history lets compare apples to apples. Until this century there wasn't any national group that wasn't theistic so by his definition that was a religious war. That's a span of 5900 years 1900 - 4000 BC approximately. I know this isn't accurate because the population of the world has not only grow but not linear. But that works out to be 1,371,186 every 100 years and we have 80,000,00 (I used the low number to get to this) by atheistic regimes (Hitler ?) in the 20th century alone.
As far as my source different places on the internet but they do jive with his (Matthew's).
As far as saying religion was evil you made the comparison "The positives of religious belief have come no where close to the negatives." so we are arguing semantics here.
We can't ever say if those atrocities would or wouldn't have happened is a priest were in control. What we do know is that they were done by people that had no religion (Biblical). While davidcasemore brought up those quotes from Hitler he neglected to check out what the Bible says about this "They claim to know God, but they deny him by what they do." Titus 1:16 So that excludes Hitler.
The Crusades were over a span of 200 years from 1095 - 1295 of there about. The Khmer Rouge killed more than that in 3 years.
The 12K was for the Inqusition this number is all over the place but and the span of years is huge 1478-1834. That number is low closer to 50K and this includes all the Inqusiton but that's over 360 years.
