Large scale war and mass atrocities have been afficting humanity since the advent of civilization. So who is most to blame for these disasters? According to the religion industry if most or all folks would just be good and obedient sheep and behave themselves by following the dictates of whatever deity a particular brand of theism promotes, then peace would reign over the planet. Theists especially conservative often contend that the atheism that has become popular in the 1900s on is exceptionally dangerous because of the tens of millions who godless communists have liquidated, particularly over a short period in the ;ast century. Of late some atheists, many Christians especially conservative, and Hindus have asserted that Islam particularly of the militant flavor has become an exceptional threat to global security.

            To figure this out in a defintive paper is a matter of stastitics. The death tolls for given wars and other events are from standard sources. 

The total human population has amounted to some 100 billion (check out https://secularfrontier.infidels.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=39745&action=edit). The basic death toll from wars and genocides over human existence is in the area of half a bullion as tabulated below, this includes all soldier-civilian losses stemming from direct military action to atrocities to indirect impacts of war such as disease (except by new contact between peoples) and famine. Therefore around half a percent of human deaths are attributable to war and genocide, acts of terrror not being enough to be statistically notable. Of the historical total, at least half, perhaps 150 million (at least two-thirds in the two super wars) occurred in the 1900s, a century in which 10 billion lived, resulting in a war-induced mortality rate of about 1.5%. These values are too low to impact global population levels. Pinker in his The Better Nature of Our Angels details how relative rates of lethal violence have tended to decline over history. 

             A portion of war dead have been slaughtered in ways that did not involve a major religious causal or exacerbating component, as per the intraCatholic Hundred Years War, as well as most of the conquests by the religiously broadminded Romans. Although the Jewish revolt against the Romans involved Jews versus pagans, the Romans conquered everyone on the Mediterranean rim without much care about their religions, and the Judaic revolt against their rule was legitimate on secular grounds. The Russian Civil War is difficult to classify because one side involved atheistic communists, but the other was equally heinous Czarist Orthodox. The Vietnam conflict was primarily anti-colonial. Yet it can be argued that most mass slaughters did involve religion because of the near universal religiosity of the participants, as per the Great War (Jenkins, 2014). A tabulation of wars and atrocities with a significant religious component is as follows – all below figures are approximate even when just one value is given. 

                                                                                                                          Millions

Yellow Turban Rebellion and Three Kingdoms Wars (Taoists v spiritualists)   7-11

Gothic Wars (Christian v pagan)                                                                            5

Conquests of Khan (a pious pagan)                                                                   10-40

Mesoamerican sacrifices and related warfare                                                      2-4

Muslim conquests (attacking pagans, Christians, Jews, Hindus)                    60-90                                                      

Crusades (Catholics attacking Cathars, Muslims, Jews, Orthodox)                    2                                                                   

Reconquista (Catholics v Muslims)                                                                       7

Conquest of the Americas (Christians attacking pagans)                                     30

French Wars of Religion (Catholic v Protestant)                                                  2-4 

Eighty Years War (Catholic v Protestant)                                                           0.5-2

Thirty Years War (Calvinist v Lutherians v Catholics)                                       5-12 

Atlantic Slave Trade (Christian exploitation of pagans & Muslims)                      5         

Taiping Rebellion (extremist Christians v spiritualist government)                       20 

Panthay Rebellion (spiritualist Chinese v Muslims)                                              1

American Civil War (conservative Protestants defending slavery)                      0.75 

Dungan revolt (Muslims v spiritualist Chinese)                                                  8-12

Belgian Congo (Catholic king exploits natives)                                                   5-12

Great War                                                                                                           15-20

Armenian Genocide (Muslims attacking Christians)                                            1.5

Conquest of Ethiopia (Fascists & Catholics attacking Coptics)                            0.2 

Spanish Civil War (Catholics attacking secular republic)                                     0.6            

World War II incl. Holocaust (Fascist theists supported by Christians + Shinto 

   militarists attacking spiritualist Chinese, atheistic communists, Jews, Slavs, 

   Roma, LGBTQ, Orthodox, Muslims, Christosecular western powers)    60-85

India-Pakistan partition & wars (Muslim v Hindu)                                              1.5               

Indonesian slaughter (Muslims attacking secular leftists)                                     0.5

East Timor (Muslims attacking Christians)                                                       0.1-0.2

Nigerian Civil War (Christian v Muslim)                                                             1-3

Afghan Civil War (extremist v moderate Muslims)                                              0.4

Post Cold War religious strife (see below)                                                           6.5

Total                                                                                                            250-(300)-370

1900-2023                                                                                                   100-(115)-130 

by Muslims                                                                                                         65-95

by Christians                                                                                                       65-85

by Nazis                                                                                                              40-50

Large scale wars and atrocities attributable to a major atheist or secular component are as follows.

Soviet regimes (incl. revolution, Stalinism incl. purges, famines, etc.)                20-60

Mao regime (incl. revolution, purges, famines, etc.)                                            40-70

Pol Pot regime                                                                                                     1-2.5

Korean War                                                                                                        1.2-1.5

Afghanistan invasion                                                                                           1-1.6

Other                                                                                                                      ~2 

Total                                                                                                               65-(100)-140

Other wars (including Chinese Rebellions                                                           100

Total of all wars                                                                                                450-550

Both theists and atheists have wreaked mass havoc. But even the fairly conservative minimum estimate of those killed by working for the religious industry that often eggs them on far exceeds the maximum dispatched by atheists, the averages suggest that theists have been almost three times as deadly over history – if it is assumed that all wars not driven by atheists are between godly combatants, then the ratio is over three to one. During the last century the competition, such as it was, was rather close, but theists probably albeit not certainly have a larger tally to their credit. A few million have died in intraatheist conflicts largely in ideological disputes concerning communism, but losses over differing views of the “correct” nature of atheism itself are essentially absent it being an either or question. And the serious atheist problem seems to have been a phenomenon of limited to about seventy years in the 1900s when enormous populations and technologies facilitated huge casualties, and because of the aberration of totalitarian communism that would not have occurred if not for the incompetence of the Czarist Orthodox regime. 

Since the Cold War whimpered out of existence with little violence, who on the non/theism spectrum is most responsible for deaths from war and atrocities? On the atheism side communist rebellions are barely simmering in a few nations. 

Peru                                                                                                                70,000 

Nepal                                                                                                             18,000

India                                                                                                              10,000

Philippines                                                                                                      5,000

Total                                                                                                            ~100,000

Pew (2014b) found that social hostilities involving religion have been rising and achieved new highs of a third of the nearly two hundred extant countries. The great proportion of these troubles in five dozen countries are religious versus religious, with some religious against secular and atheist victims. Casualties attributable to recent and ongoing conflicts involving at least a significant religious component, ranging from exacerbating ethnic tensions and disputes over territory and resources, to being the primary cause of the conflict. 

Balkans (Orthodox v Catholic & Muslim)                                                   250,000

Chechnya (Muslim v Orthodox)                                                                   200,000 

Tajikistan (extremist v moderate Muslims)                                                     50,000

Israel v Palestinians (Jew v Muslim)                                                              50,000

India v Pakistan (Hindu v Muslim)                                                                60,000

Algeria (extremist v moderate Muslim)                                                         150,000

Somalia (extremist v moderate Muslim)                                                        550,000 

Afghanistan (Taliban v moderate Muslim)                                                    400,000

Islamic terrorism                                                                                            60,000

Post 9/11-Afghanistan (extremist Sunni v Christians and seculars)              40,000

Iraq (initiated by conservative Christian Americans, later Sunni v Shiite)     250,000  

Pakistan (Taliban v moderate Sunnis)                                                            40,000

Yemen (Shiite v Sunni)                                                                                   5,000 

Syria (Alawite v Sunni)                                                                                130,000

Thailand (Buddhists v Muslims)                                                                     4,000

Congo, Zaire, Uganda, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Central      4,500,000

        African Republic 

        (extremist Christians v extremist Muslims v animists & shamanists)

Russo-Ukraine (Russian Orthodox v secular)                                          300-350,000

Total                                                                                                6,500,000+ 

The ongoing casualty count between theism and atheism is far from being close, theism having contributed to up to sixty times as many war deaths as has atheism over the last third of a century. With the theostrife lead growing fast religiosity is clearly the much greater danger than atheism in our century. Most international terror is Islamic, 21^st century Islam is engaged in an antiquated civil war (largely but by no means entirely Sunni versus Shia), and a case can be made that in the most explicitly theistic struggles extremist Muslims have been the primary initiators. But the bulk of the overall losses have occurred in the west-central African zone where Christian elements have been playing a major role in the mayhem and sociopathy. In Europe Christianity – mainly eastern Orthodox – has been and is the most lethal agent. Of special note is that the Russian Orthodox church is fully in cynical bed with the Putin dictatorship and its mass casualty invasion of Ukraine. In terms of death numbers Christianity is currently the deadliest religion, not Islam. The forever war that is the Israeli-Palestinian situation is complicated. The latter have a legitimate claim of having been ethnically cleansed and otherwise abused since World War 2, with mass casualties from 2024 to today. The Muslim side of the contest has been prone to conducting extreme terrorism including on a mass scale in 2024. Observe that the vast majority of victims of theistic violence are other theists. Atheism is no longer a major contributor to violence and death by war, certainly no atheistic democracy is engaged in social hostilities against theists. Theoconservative Reagan’s notorious prediction that the end of the godless Soviet Empire would remove the main source of evil in the world has proven deeply naïve, it being theists who are the main and rising source of modern strife and dysfunction, being many dozens of times more dangerous than atheists on a per capita basis. 

Over long history and into modern times there is no evidence that religion in general is pacific, or more peaceful than atheism, instead it has been posing a serious danger for millennia. Non-Jewish Abrahamists have been responsible for the greatest toll of any single cohort, 130-180 million, with Christians and Muslims closely matching one another, although the latter may have the lethal edge. The swift devastation by the virulently racist and aggressive Christo-pagan Nazis who imagined only Aryans had immortal souls and Jews were the children of Lucifer was especially remarkable. The Catholic and German Lutheran churches were in bed with the Fascists (https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-%20%20do/publications/eph/journals/volume31/paul and refs therein).   

A notable and analytically important feature of the largely secular prosperous democracies is their friendly relations and corresponding lack of tendency to engage in war among themselves.  Of these, the relatively religious United States waged unprovoked wars of conquest against the natives and Mexico. These days it is the most prone to go to war with less industrialized nations, and the often theoconservative MAGA that now runs the government is threatening to assault neighboring lands.