Tyrant technological normalization

[Skiltch]

It's somewhat common, in religious debates, for a religious person to say something along the lines of, "Yes, the Crusades/the Inquisition/the Catholic-Protestant-Anglican struggles/etc. were horrible, and bloody, but atheists have killed far more people. Just look at Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot."
I would contend, though, and I have seen others contend (including here on this forum), that this isn't really fair because the last century saw lots of new technology to make killing people really easy. The Crusaders did not have gas chambers, machine guns, bombs, or anything close to the sort of modern weaponry. They may have wanted or tried to have killed as many as the most recent dictators have, but simply couldn't because the tools they would have liked to use weren't invented yet.

Does anyone know of a good resource about this -- i.e., a resource that does sort of a technological normalization of wars and/or murderous dictators and says that such and such Grand Inquisitor was x% as murderous as a more recent killer, based on the tools available to him?
Sorry if this is sort of a bizarre request, but I've seen the argument a lot recently and it got me curious as to what sort of lists exist.

[technoextreme]

Hitler wasn't an atheist so by invoking Godwins law all religious people are doing is showing ignorance of history.:rolleyes:

[Mark Felt]

Remember the flood? Nobody can match up to god on this point.

[Wudang]

And dialectic materialism bears many of the hallmarks of a religion - esp that facts have to be bent to fit dogma. Cf Uncle Joe and Lysenko
Stalin's religious views are less than clear though some of the claims I've read for his continued theism can be viewed as pragmatic politics in a country at war.

[paximperium]

Do not fall to their level of discourse.

Their argument is a non-sequitur. Atheism did not lead to modern atrocities therefore the number killed by Communism, Nazism and the other -isms are irrelevant to their claims.

[Wudang]

I have heard a slightly more sophisticated argument - that Stalin et al committed these atrocities due to their interpretation of atheism just as Torquemada did on his interpretation of xianity. Thus it is the interpretation rather than the root idea to blame.

[Safe-Keeper]

Atheism did not lead to modern atrocitiesExactly.

If you're told that people have done dreadful things in the name of their religion, and in fact because of their religion, you can't just turn around and say that atheists have done bad things, too - because those atheists did not do what they did because of their atheism.

Of course what is implied is something like "well, sure, religion causes bad stuff to happen, but bad stuff would happen anyway, just look at Mao/Pol Pot/Stalin/Kim Jong-il". Which of course doesn't change the fact that if religion went away, there'd be one less incentive to wage war and as a result a possibility of less warfare.

To put it another way, it's like me saying "so what if alcohol makes it twelve times more dangerous to drive a car? It's not like sober people have accidents, too!".

[RobRoy]

Do not fall to their level of discourse.

Their argument is a non-sequitur. Atheism did not lead to modern atrocities therefore the number killed by Communism, Nazism and the other -isms are irrelevant to their claims.

It's actually not a non-sequitur, since religious conquest/conversion is typically only a justification. If we're truly engaging in discourse, then greed, glory, and power are all far more to "blame" than religion.

As for some kind of mathematical conversion chart for scaling up or down available technology to death ratios, I've never seen anything like this. I'm not certain how relevant it would be anyhow, as you'd have to factor in the motivation for such attrocities, not just the means by which they were carried out. For example, Hitler was out to exterminate the Jews, Catholics, homosexuals and anyone else he wasn't overly fond of. If he'd wanted to just slaughter everyone, he certainly could have done much greater damage. Compare that to Godfrey of Bouillon who helped lead the siege and then the massacre of Jerulsalem during the First Crusade. He and his men certainly had the capacity to slaughter more folk than they did, but, if you were spared during the initial rush, you could buy or beg your own life.

In the end, though, I think the two arguments are a wash. Humans typically don't need a whole lot of justification for being brutal to other humans, up to and including mass homocide and genocide. How many soldiers have stated that they were just following orders in carrying out brutal attacks?

[Skiltch]

Thanks, everyone, for your responses.
RobRoy, cool, I hadn't thought of it like that -- hadn't thought of factoring in motivation, I mean. And also, Safe-Keepet, that's a good point that people don't wage war in the name of atheism.
Thanks everyone!