Religious Violence

Some people have some strange hobbies. For example, Matthew White at Necrometrics.com apparently spends his time cataloging death tolls and body counts for various events throughout history. 

I've taken some numbers from this site because I was curious if the saying is true that "religion has caused more suffering and death than any other single cause in human history."

The site lists various scholarly estimates for each event. When possible, I've tried to select the most reliable sources, or have used the median, following the rule of thumb that the truth is usually somewhere in the middle, rather than with the outlying estimates. 

Here are the numbers for various religious tragedies throughout history:

Christianity

Holocaust: 5.6M

Crusades: 3M

Biblical Atrocities: 1.283M

Spanish Inquisition: 341K (Including those tortured, not killed)

Witch Hunts: 60K (Including Europe)

9/11: 3,037 (Including 19 hijackers)

TOTAL: est. 10.828M

Now here's a few things with a higher death toll:

Atheists

I point this out, not to be controversial, but only to provide an example of human violence which is clearly not religiously motivated. 

Since the origins Islam and Christianity, each religion has had 80M and 70M martyrs respectively, at the hands of:

Atheists: 31,689,000

Muslims 9,121,000

Ethnoreligionists: 7,469,000

Christians: 5,538,000

Quasi-religionists 2,712,000

Mahayana Buddhists: 1,651,000

Hindus: 676,000

Zoroastrians: 384,000

Smoking

R. Peto, "Mortality from tobacco in developed countries: indirect estimation from national vital statistics" Lancet, 23 May 1992:

1930-59: 11M

1960s: 9M

1970s: 13M

1980s: 17M

1990s: 21M

TOTAL (1930-1999): 71M tobacco-related deaths in developed countries. (US, Europe, USSR, Canada, Japan, Australia, NZ)

Capitalism 

(unbridled corporate exploitation)

Colonial El Niño Famines (1876-1900): 27M

Colonial Slave Trade (1700-1850): 17.8M (Only counting the dead among the first generation of slaves brought from Africa. Subsequent generations would contribute additional premature or unnatural deaths.)

Islamic Slave Trade: 19M

Soviet Decommunization: 6M

Kinshasa Congo: 3.8M 

Amazonian Rubber Companies: 200K

TOTAL: est. 73.8M


If the number of people killed by some organization or phenomenon is a measure of its moral worth, than we could come to some strange conclusions about a host of other causes.

I think, given enough information, an honest individual would come to agree that an organization's negative past is not necessarily a mark against it in the present.