Institutional Atheism Kills

An excellent article, read the whole thing...

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Many conflicts that appear at first glance to be religious in nature are actually political or cultural wars that divide along religious lines. The strife in Northern Ireland is not a theological dispute about Catholicism vs. Protestantism per se, but rather a cultural power struggle between two groups of people. In like manner, much of the conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is the result of ethnic hostilities, not genuine religious differences.
The Crusades, the Inquisition, some of the religious wars of the Reformation, and the Salem witch trials, on the other hand, were more theological. Even so, the record is not as grim as many make it.
Thousands of witches were not burned at the stake. The Salem witch trials resulted in only nineteen executions before it was stopped by Christians. The Spanish Inquisition involved thousands and the Crusades tens of thousands, not millions.
Of course, it’s tragic when even a handful of innocent lives are taken. Injustice isn’t justified because the numbers diminish. But an accurate accounting does serve to put things in perspective, especially when one considers the alternative: Has atheism fared better?
Greatest Murderers
The simple fact of history is that the greatest evil has always resulted from denial of God, not pursuit of Him. Dennis Prager has noted, "In this [20th] century alone, more innocent people have been murdered, tortured, and enslaved by secular ideologiesnazism and communismthan by all religions in history."
Grab an older copy of the Guinness Book of World Records and turn to the category "Judicial," sub-heading "Crimes: Mass Killings." You’ll find that carnage of unimaginable proportions resulted not from religion, but from institutionalized atheism.
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 USSR, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that state repression and terrorism took over 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 eight 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....

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One can’t hold Christianity responsible when so-called Christians violate the written instructions. The fault is not with Christ, but with people who disobey Him.
Jesus was quite clear on this: "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments" (John 14:15). His command to love extended even to one’s enemy (Luke 10:29-37).
The Apostle John reflects the same view: "By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother" (1 John 3:10).
Nothing in Christian teaching itself mandates forcible conversion to the faith or coerced adherence to Biblical doctrines. The teachings of Christ do not lead logically to wanton bloodshed.
Jesus Himself warned of interlopers, wolves in sheep’s clothing. His assessment of them is unmistakable: "I never knew you. Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness" (Matthew 7:23).
The actual track record for genuine disciples of Jesus Christthose who follow the written instructionsis much different. Two Biblical teachings have made Christianity the greatest force for good in the history of the world.
First is the teaching that God reigns over a moral universe He created. He requires virtuous behavior from His subjects and will one day judge each person’s conduct with perfect justice.
Second, Christian morality is informed by the notion that human beings are made in the image of God and therefore have transcendent value. This has been the foundation for Christian ethics for 2,000 years....

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Education was one of the earliest concerns of the colonists, according to the pamphlet New England’s First Fruits. This was in the tradition of the Reformation because Calvin and Luther had emphasized the need of education so that the individual could read his Bible and so that leaders for the church and state could be trained. The Bible had first place in their curricula and that of the educational institutions of early America, and classical training took second place as an aid to the full knowledge of the Bible.
In fact, all of the Ivy League schools were started with theological intentYale, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, et al. Our own educational system was founded on the need to teach citizens to read the Bible and to provide leadership for the church and state.
This was the pattern wherever Christianity went. In A Concise History of the Christian World Mission, Herbert Kane reports, "In China...missionaries...operated thousands of elementary schools, as well as hundreds of high schools, as well as thirteen full-fledged Christian universities."
Missionaries made Africa literate. Kane notes, "There are 860 known languages and dialects in Africa. A hundred years ago fewer than twenty had a written form. Since then five hundred have been reduced to writingall the work of missionaries." ...

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In the nineteenth century, William Wilberforce spent a lifetime working to abolish slavery in England and the British commonwealth. Cairns records, "Slavery was ended in British possessions by an act passed just before Wilberforce’s death in 1833," an achievement, he adds, that "would have been impossible without the work of Wilberforce and his evangelical friends in Parliament."
Opposition to slavery by Christians here in America led us into Civil War. Their objection was based on the Christian belief that human beings are free people before God and ought not be owned by anyone else. This conviction was the moral foundation for abolition. ...

...This is Christianity’s real record, not a history of evil, violence, and debauchery, but a legacy of radical transformation for good.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=christianitys_real_record&ns=GregKoukl&dt=11/21/2006&page=full&comments=true

 

I think you can read into the article, and figure it out for yourself.