I’m sick and tired of atheists blaming Christians for killing millions of people or condemning the God of the Bible for doing so. It’s not actually a logical position for them to take.
If religion, as they see it, is a baseless form of social control invented by our survival driven minds to make people be nice to each other then it’s not actually “Christians” killing people, or God killing people. It’s people killing people.
If the Christian God is a baseless myth how can he be accused of killing people? If Christianity is a delusion then surely the defence of insanity works for those who allegedly killed in God’s name.
Christianity can not, by itself, be responsible for the death of anybody. It can, at best, be the justification used by a killer for their actions either from a deluded sense of duty or because they’re looking to act in a sinister manner and need a scapegoat.
On one hand atheists will often assert that there is no such thing as evil and on the other they’ll call religion (and especially Christianity) evil on the basis of a few conflicts throughout history that were pretty clearly the actions of depraved and power hungry individuals disguising their ambitions in a cover of religiosity.
The “new atheist” will also claim that all the good stuff we take for granted – like the end of slavery – was won through the “enlightenment”. What they fail to mention is that more people were killed during the enlightenment’s French Revolution (16,000 to 40,000 during the “Reign of Terror”) than during the Spanish Inquisition (3,000 – 5,000).