Has the Catholic religion killed more than any other religion?

Answer 1

My initial reaction is to say, of course not, there is absolutely nothing in Catholicism about killing other than God telling us that it is a mortal sin. That said, there are people who are absolutely certain that the Catholic religion has killed off "millions" of people during the Crusades and the various Inquisitions (well, actually the first thing to look at is that there weren't a million people in all of Europe for many of those centuries). Now the first thing to look at is that the Catholic Church, itself, has never condoned killing. The Church has organized defensive wars, the Crusades were one of these. The necessity for the Crusades was brought on by the Muslims killing thousands of Christians in the Holy Land and enslaving the rest. The numbers for the Inquisition are grossly inflated due to the fact that the protestant nations used them as Propaganda. The latest Inquisition, and most famous - the Spanish Inquisition was run by the King and Queen of Spain, not the Church. And in the 350 years that the Spanish Inquisition ran, they maybe averaged two executions a year that were sentenced and carried out by the state for treason. The other charge leveled against the Church was the killing of heretics, for instance the Albigensians. Again, this was mostly the work of the rulers at that time. You must understand that for most of history the religion of the ruler was the religion of that state and heretics were viewed as traitors by the state. For hundreds of years, Europe was a Catholic continent that was ruled by Catholic Kings and Queens. For the most part it was the Church that actually stopped wholesale murder, it was the Church that put a damper on things and tried to get people to act like Christians. Even in the Crusades, it was the vast numbers of outright murders by the Muslims that provoked the Christian nations to come to the aid of their enslaved brothers and sisters.

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So, if you look at the actual - the real numbers of people that were killed in any particular time period and stack them up against the people that were killed by the protestants, say in England and Ireland, or the Muslims in the Mid-east, and then realize that in the first case it was Christian killing Christians, and in the second case monotheist killing monotheist, or in the case of Nazi-German, or the Communists, atheists killing Catholics, you must come to the conclusion that no, the Catholic religion has NOT killed more than any other religion, even though they are the oldest and the largest western, Christian religion.