War and religion

[achilles12604]

This debate sort of started on its own after I posted my findings about the correlation between religion and war casualties over the last 1000 years. It then recently came up in another thread.

So I am putting it out there for debate. Are my facts and figures correct? Are they applicable? If not, then where did I go wrong? And most importantly, if I am incorrect, how would you do better?

I also encourage anyone to do the same thing I did and obtain a list of all the major (+1000 deaths) conflicts and then sort them out due to primary causes. It took me about 10-11 hours to do.

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... php?t=7085

[achilles12604]

I don't think it can be all that clear cut... religious or non religious. or ignorance.
for example, the strong 'anti-condom' message of the RCC is causing a lot more incidences of aids than if it wasn't there, but there would be many cases anyway.

Besides, your topic was 'war'.. and famines were not war.

I included them because it appears that Stalin et al used them against specific political targets. And I still think that this point is made soundly.

For the sake of argument, we can remove them for the purpose of our debate. That removes 89 million from the non-religious. Now the ratio is 133 million to 350 million or just around a 1 : 2.6 ratio.

Religion is still behind by more than 2/3. Almost 3/4.

And that is assuming that those famines were in fact NOT attributed to policial reasons, which I think they were.

Any other objections? Even given that generous chunk, my point still stands very firm.