Dateline: September 11, 2025
Every time violence erupts under the banner of faith, a chorus of secular voices leaps to remind us: “Religion kills.” They point to the Crusades, the Inquisition, ISIS, or sectarian wars and declare belief in God the root of humanity’s bloodlust. Yet this selective memory ignores the most catastrophic slaughters in modern history—slaughters carried out by regimes that explicitly rejected religion.
Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was a state where atheism was the official creed, churches shuttered, and faith-driven communities persecuted. His rule saw the gulag system swallow millions, and his engineered famines—most infamously the Holodomor in Ukraine—left countless dead. Estimates range from 6 million to over 20 million lives extinguished (Conquest, 1990; Applebaum, 2003).
Mao Zedong in China went even further. The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) was a man-made disaster of staggering proportions, killing between 30 and 45 million through famine, forced collectivization, and executions (Dikötter, 2010). The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) deepened the devastation, targeting intellectuals, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens alike. These deaths were not “in the name of God” but in the name of ideology—Marxism twisted into totalitarianism and fused with Mao’s cult of personality.
Contrast these numbers with religious wars. The European Wars of Religion, including the Thirty Years’ War, may have killed 8 million (Parker, 1997). The Crusades, stretched over centuries, killed perhaps 1 to 3 million (Riley-Smith, 2005). ISIS and Al-Qaeda combined are responsible for tens of thousands, horrific but not on the same scale.
The pattern is clear: the problem is not belief in God, nor disbelief. The problem is absolute power joined to an ideology that makes human beings disposable. Whether the justification is “God wills it” or “History demands it,” the machinery of mass murder runs on the same fuel—fanatic certainty and the erasure of individual worth.
This is the lesson Americans must take seriously today. Fascism in the United States does not need a church to sanctify its violence; it has the flag, the market, and the strongman’s word. When Trump and his allies whip up martyr myths around figures like Charlie Kirk, they are not invoking God so much as invoking a creed of domination and purity. The danger lies not in faith or atheism, but in surrendering moral responsibility to any totalizing system.
Blaming religion alone is too easy. Stalin and Mao prove you don’t need God to kill millions—you just need an ideology that demands obedience and strips away humanity. That’s what fascism offers today. And that’s why it must be stopped.
References
- Applebaum, A. (2003). Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday.
- Conquest, R. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Dikötter, F. (2010). Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. New York: Walker & Company.
- Parker, G. (1997). The Thirty Years’ War. London: Routledge.
- Riley-Smith, J. (2005). The Crusades: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Occupy 2.5 
few, if any, claim that religion is the “sole killer”. What we do point out is that it has killed many and theists invent lies to excuse that. Religion directly gives excuses why some people are better than others e.g. “we are the chosen people.”
To claim that atheism was the reason that Stalin, Mao etc killed is quite a lie since there is nothing to support that. It was megalomania and blind obedience that caused such things. As you indicate, it is where humans declare they are better than each other, and nothing about atheism supports that.